Originally posted by: sactoking
I don't know a single responsible financial adviser or credit counselor who would recommend ANY of the 'credit-monitoring' products.
Basically, you're better off taking your free report once per year and then buying direct from one of the agencies (I like Equifax, as they are the only one to use a TRUE FICO score) every 4 or 6 months. Anything more than that is throwing your money away.
If you're concerned about credit, there are other, free alternatives. You can contact the bureaus and tell them not to issue new credit unless they contact you, for instance.
I work with credit all day long, and I recommend people use a service, when they bring it up, usually Equifax. There is no harm to your credit if you want to pull it every day or get daily alerts or a monthly score - it?s your $10 a month.
That being said though, even just getting one score doesn?t always help. My company uses different scoring models depending on what product you apply for. For example, for deposit accounts, we use Equifax?s Beacon score model for one simple reason, it?s cheap. Since we give away money with checking accounts now, cost is a concern. For Auto Loans we use TransRisk, however it used to be the PLUS score that we used. Your mileage will almost always vary, unless you pull all of them or know the specific one the company you are applying for a product with uses for that product, and unless you talk to the person actually doing the pulling, most staff have no idea nowadays. So, I do agree with you about pulling the actual score all the time, that can be useless.
Almost everyone is confused about credit score ranges too, even the credit reporting agencies themselves.
Here is some fun reading of all the contradictions