As the Equifax hack headlines have reminded us in spades the last few months, it’s important to monitor your credit — basically, watch it to be sure it’s error free and there are no signs your identity has been stolen. By all means, we agree you should take advantage of free credit monitoring. But remember monitoring only gets you so far — if you do discover your identity has been stolen, you’ll certainly want someone who can fix the mess, that’s why it’s important to pay for a fully managed identity theft restoration service.
In this blog post, I will share some free credit monitoring tools you might consider using.
But first, a few thoughts:
- While Equifax has offered its own version of credit monitoring for free for a year, we don’t suggest it. Read more here.
- It’s important to note that if you have a credit freeze on your credit, you might have to temporarily lift it in order to sign up for one of these services.
- A free credit monitoring service should never ask for your credit card information in order to sign up so if you stumble across one that does, we suggest forgoing it and looking at one of these tools, instead:
AnnualCreditReport.com
Thanks to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, you can get a free copy of your credit report from each of the three major nationwide credit reporting companies — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion — each year through annualcreditreport.com.
Many experts recommend spacing these out so that you’re getting a report every four months throughout the year. Set a calendar reminder up ahead of time to remind you. You can get a copy of the report delivered instantly online or shipped within a few weeks if requested by mail or phone.
CreditWise by Capital One
Capital One offers its CreditWise monitoring service to everyone, even people who do not have their credit card. They utilize TransUnion for the information provided and currently offer three services within CreditWise. Along with helping you to understand the key factors that impact your credit score, they send email alerts whenever there are changes on your credit report; and provide access to your credit report so you can look for signs of error, theft, or fraud. They advise that using CreditWise will not hurt your credit score.
Free Credit Monitoring from Your Bank or Card Issuer
Many banks and card issuers now offer free credit monitoring services. A good example is the Discover Card, which advertises this service frequently on TV. It is possible that your bank or card issuer may already offer it, so you won’t have to go to a third party or pay for it to get monitoring. Best yet, you don’t have to give your personal information to someone who doesn’t already have it. We all have enough personal information out there.
Remember, as we mentioned previously, there are limitations to a credit freeze. That’s because there are many types of identity theft that won’t even show up on your credit report, which is why it’s important to subscribe to an identity restoration service.
Again, if your identity is stolen, you’ll certainly want someone who can fix the mess, that’s why it’s important to pay for a fully managed identity theft restoration service.
LibertyID provides expert, full service, fully managed identity theft restoration to individuals, couples, extended families* and businesses. LibertyID has a 100% success rate in resolving all forms of identity fraud on behalf of our subscribers.
*Extended families – primary individual, their spouse/partner, both sets of parents (including those that have been deceased for up to a year), and all children under the age of 25
Photo Credit: Credit Monitoring, CafeCredit.com, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0