I signed up last night for Lending Tree's service which proveds a free credit report (experian), and researching this site I find that people say that you are constantly monitoring your credit report. How do you get credit reports so often without paying $24.95 each for a report from all 3? Is there a preferred service that you all like to use that doesn't totally jeopardize the credit score or charge a monthly arm-and-a-leg? Jim
Can't answer about the monthly monitoring deals they got going on now, cause I only pull a report when I need to. But, when I was actively watching my credit, I used a subscription service from each of the bureaus. At that time, ya paid XX.XX per month, and ya could pull as much as you want. They have the deals now where ya can monitor your reports from the individual bureaus, and sometimes you can call them beforehand and see if they have some type of deal going. Pulling yer own report from the bureaus themselves doesn't hurt your score like what alotta people think. The inquiry it makes is only seen by you. Good luck! Oops, almost forgot - people still use privacyguard, and a friend told me that he lucked out with one of the specials goin on there. www.privacyguard.com BUT - only you can decide if it's what ya want
Hi! You can easily get free credit reports online that later require you to pay a fee BUT it's also easy to cancel an account. So why don't you just sign up and get your when you need it and then just cancel? Jim
That's good advice! And remember too to make sure the places ya go to ta get your free reports/free trials are real, cause there's places that are mistypings of the real sites that give free reports, and they look legitimate, but when you put your info in, they will run off and do who knows what with it!
Yes, I think everyone should be aware of what is called "phishing", which is what ArmondoNLA described. I wanted to copy/paste a short paragraph here that was seen on another site, but I don't know if I'm allowed to do that (if I can, let me know, and I'll put it here). But the main idea is that many of the offers for free credit reports are bogus, and that by trying to get a report in these way, it can inadvertantly give the wrong people your information, and they can do some bad things with that. (clean out your accounts, ID theft, etc). You can get a free copy of your report once every 12 months from annualcreditreport.com (this is legit). As far as monitoring services, I've seen a few mentioned on this site. I am currently using 2 of them, though one is usually all you need. Both have free trials of 30 days, so you can decide what you want. I did the 30 day trial and chose 1 of them (MyFico.com) because they give real FICO scores, not fake ones. However, I am now also using TrueCredit even though the scores are FAKO (not real, but close), I can get a new report once every day, which is good if you are trying to buy a house. I know nothing about Lending Tree's services. And for the record, I am not one of the experts here. I wouldn't call myself a newbie anymore, but I have a lot to learn yet. But I may have something to offer to some others now, and I can share my experiences and hope it is helpful. As another poster said, you'll have to decide what is best for you.
Yes, phishing is quite a problem; I've read about several people trying to copy websites like e-bay or amazon. These days, some anti-virus products offer phishing protection for popular websites; I'm not sure if financial ones ar included in their list but it's better to pay attention to places that as for private data anyway. Just pick a few websites and add them to your "favorites" folder to make everything simpler... Oh and remember never to use payday loans
