Free Credit Rating Check
I want a credit score monitoring service that sends me my FICO credit
score by email frequently, such as once per week or twice per month.
Most of them seem sleazy to me. For example, some say in their ads
that they will send the score everytime it has a significant change,
but they don't disclose how much of a change they consider
significant.
Does anyone have any experience with any such service that is neither
costly nor sleazy?
As far as I understand, the only place that would reliably alert you about
the changes in your credit file, would be the credit bureau itself; but of
course it would only alert about their own file, not others'. All other
services would be either very expensive, or unreliable. The reason for that
is that the only way they can monitor your credit file(s) is by doing
regular credit checks on you. Since the bureaus charge for checking, there's
direct proportion between the cost of the service and frequency of their
inquiries. They, however, may have one more important source of revenue -
see below.
For example, there's website myperfectcredit.com that provides credit
monitoring with score for free; I have an account, and as I can see, they
hardly make even one check in a year.
When looking for such credit monitoring, make sure you very carefully read
the fine print. For one example, see this my post:
http://groups.google.com/group/misc.consumers/browse_frm/thread/e83c5...
- how one of these companies, IdentityTrack, reserves the right to sell
your credit file (that is, with SSN, account numbers, and everything else)
to pretty much anyone.