Recently I was looking around for credit reporting services to recommend on BudgetSimple when I realized that almost every company that offers these services is really just a shady subscription service in disguise.
You’ve seen the commercials for “Free Credit Report” and you may even know that it’s your right in many states to get a free credit report once per year, but that doesn’t mean anyone makes it easy to do so!
The worst I’ve seen is that most of these so-called “free credit score” services are really just getting you to signup for a subscription service, which typically ranges from $15-30 a month. These subscription services are sold as “score trackers” and “credit monitoring”, but I have my doubts that these would ever be worth it.
I’d love to hear from anyone that has gotten their monies worth with any of these services, so maybe I’m wrong, but instead my official recommendation would be to avoid any subscription credit monitoring and instead check your credit once per year.
It is important to check your credit given the pervasiveness of identify theft these days, and also to understand what your credit score is in the event you’ll be making a large purchase (such as a home).
While you usually can mail away for a free credit report from the agencies, I’ve traditionally used the Equifax 3-in-1 credit report, but again be careful, because they seem to be trying to get people to signup for one of these monitoring services as well. This way you’ll get a credit score, in addition to the reports.
