Are Credit Monitoring Services Worth It?
Should you hire a credit report monitoring service to keep an eye on your report for you? Keep in mind though that all a credit monitoring service does is report to you if they see something suspicious on your credit report; they don’t actually prevent anything bad from happening to your credit report. All they really do is give you some early warning that there’s a problem. This can give you a head start when it comes to cleaning up the mess.
The public’s rising concern about identity theft has created a lucrative marketing opportunity for all kinds of companies that will keep their eye on your credit (for a fee of course.) These businesses were almost non-existent ten years ago but now credit monitoring and similar privacy protection services are a $2.t billion industry according to the non-partisan organization – the Center of Social & Legal Research.
The quality of these credit-monitoring services varies widely and most credit monitoring services have very few cons as opposed to pros if you hire them. Some of the drawbacks of hiring credit monitoring services are –
• They are not thorough – Typically, the service only checks one credit bureau’s report with only periodic monitoring of the other two. Some services stick only to checking one bureau and never check the other two. Obviously you want a bureau that checks all three.
• They are expensive – The cheapest services cost about forty dollars a year for the monitoring of a single report that is updated quarterly. For more comprehensive services you definitely will be charged more than a one hundred dollars and it is more than likely that you will be charged more than $200 a year.
• They may not be ahead of the thief – The very best services promise to alert you within 24 hours if someone applies for credit in you name. However most of them only update you on a weekly, monthly or even quarterly basis. Again because most of these credit-monitoring services do not provide daily monitoring of all three bureaus the theft of your identity may not be reported for months.
Many experts who specialize in identity theft suggest that most people are better off requesting their reports periodically from the three bureaus rather than paying for credit monitoring. The theory is that if you rotate your requests so that you first get a report from Experian, then three months later one from TransUnion and then three months after tone from Equifax. If you keep up the rotation you will see each bureau’s report at least twice every six months for much less money then you’d pay a credit monitoring service to provide you with the same information.
If you do decide you want a monitoring service’s help make sure you find out the following information before you hire them –
• How often your report is checked at each bureau and how often those reports are updated
• How quickly you’ll be sent an email if something suspicious occurs. Find out how long it takes the service to bring any mistake on any report at the three bureaus to your attention.
• Find out how much the service costs and how often you will be charged.
• Find out if other services such as identity theft insurance, and concierge help in reporting identity theft is offered along with the fee and how you can access these services is the event of identity theft.