Credit Report and Score Monitoring - Why You Need Both (Preferably Daily) [By Sean Dean]

Today's volatile economy coupled with a huge increase in living our lives online and on plastic leave us vulnerable to not only identity theft, but damaging changes to our credit score that can effect our ability to obtain housing, jobs, loans, and credit.

These conditions have given rise to a large increase of consumers who want or need to keep a close watch on their credit records, transactions, and any suspicious activity and / or mistakes that arise. Whether you really need this service or not greatly depends greatly on your situation. If you make purchases solely with cash, own your your house outright, if you don't rely upon your credit score for mortgages, credit cards, housing, or job seeking, then you can likely skip this.

But, here are a few scenarios in which having credit report and score monitoring might be a good idea:

You May Be Seeking A Loan, Credit, Or Refinancing In The Future And / Or You're Trying To Improve Your Credit Score: Unfortunately, today it's just a reality that your credit score can define who you are financially speaking. Today it's common place for perspective employers, schools, landlords, loan officers, credit companies, and mortgage brokers to carefully check your credit for even very small transactions. Getting a reliable credit score that covers the major 3 reporting agencies is a necessary first step to getting an accurate view of how creditors will see you. But this is only one piece of the puzzle. Today, credit monitoring companies commonly help clients come up with a plan to improve their credit sore / rating and can help aid you in correcting any errors or mistakes on your credit report. I was surprised to learn that up to 70% of reports have at least small errors that can easily be fixed.

You've Had A Recent Divorce / Separation And / Or Need To Separate Accounts Because You Are Trying To Establish Your Own Individual Credit: Even if your (ex) spouse cooperates fully, it can be a good idea to check and make sure there are no outstanding accounts, references to, or records of any one but you on your accounts. It's better to know this and take care of it before you need to procure funding and then have this issue come up and stall or ruin the process. Sometimes, to secure funding, couples split their assets / debts if one person's credit is bad. This is another situation where it's a good idea to check and make sure all accounts reflect this information before you're in a situation where this could hurt your chances to obtain reasonable credit.

You've Had, Suspect, Or Are At High Risk For Identity Theft: If you have multiple financial credit accounts, bank online, pay by credit card or have had a recent death or birth in your family, you could be at a higher risk for identity theft. It's well documented how costly, time consuming, and annoying it can be for victims of identity theft the sort this all out. Not only will monitoring companies typically immediately notify you of any activity, they will also sometimes offer insurance should theft occur.

For people who've already had or suspect identity theft, it's important to carefully monitor your accounts so that you can immediately freeze unauthorized transactions. Unfortunately, thieves only need an extremely short amount of time to rack up a large sum of debts fast and cause a huge amount of damage to your credit that can be quite maddening to remedy. That's why daily monitoring is preferred. Anything else gives thieves too much time to do too much damage.

While these annoying scenarios are yet another cost of a high tech society, if there is any good news, it's that the popularity and need for these monitoring services has brought their cost down. You can now usually get daily monitoring for around $10 per month. For a couple dollars more, you can get thousands of dollars of protection should an identity theft occur.

I don't believe that free credit monitoring is a great idea as most times it will only notify you of a change, without telling you what that the change is. (Often you'll then have to pay for this information). And it's never a good idea to hand over your personal financial information to anyone with whom you are not intimately familiar or a large. That's why I think its a better idea to stick with well known, larger financial institutions (preferably one of the major three reporting companies).

Credit Score Monitoring is a website that helps consumers obtain, evaluate and monitor their credit scores for the lowest price possible, starting at $9.99. Visit us at http://know-your-fico-credit-score.blogspot.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_Dean

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