We’ve all heard news reports about data breaches of major companies. We never would hear about this type of thing in the past but the government has been more stringent and requires companies to disclose when breaches occur. For this reason, here is how to monitor your credit for free to protect your financial health.
The only way I can see to actually fight this would be to set up another federal agency whose only function would be to create a long unique identifier for people who’ve been victims of identity theft. Maybe they should do this for everyone, since the hackers are coming after all of us. More important, they should make the identifier long and one that is changeable so if it’s compromised you can get a new one. Remember social security numbers were intended for one thing, your social security account! But it’s the number that is used when you apply for a loan, credit card, or when you open a bank account.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened yet. But there are things you can do and I found some free services for how to monitor your credit. It’s not an all-inclusive list but what you need is a look out for your crooks.
• Experian offers a free credit monitoring service with access to your credit report and FICO score.
• Discover Card will post your credit score on your monthly statement. If you see it drop, that’s blinking red light telling you ask why.
• Credit Karma offers free credit monitoring, credit reports pulled from Equifax and TransUnion, and even have a system to track your credit score.
• WalletHub offers free credit monitoring services and can give you daily credit score updates.
• Credit Sesame offers identity theft protection and credit monitoring for free.
• Credit.com lets you access your Experian credit report and provided credit monitoring for free.
• Quizzle offers you access to your Equifax credit report and credit monitoring all for free too.
• CreditWise from Capital One is something that offers you access to your TransUnion credit report and credit monitoring for free. And you don’t even need to be a Capitol One customer.
• AAA offers ProtectMyID credit monitoring tied to Experian
Just for monitoring your credit report there are free sources just for that too. All three credit bureaus, Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian give you your report once a year. You can space out your requests during the year and keep an eye out for any activity. Those other services also can be used to access those reports more frequently. And AnnualCreditReport.com lets you get all three credit reports from the major credit bureaus. There’s another service called ChexSystems which is at ChexSystems.com lets you access their reports on you once a year for free. Banks can sometimes use ChexSystems when you open a deposit account. Banks don’t do this all the time.
You always have the option of taking more proactive measures if you start having problems with your credit score for identity theft protection. For example, all the three credit bureaus and even ChexSystems will let you put freezes and alerts. And there are many paid credit monitoring services like LifeLock. Furthermore, even the credit bureaus sell that same type of paid credit monitoring services as well.
But the free services are a great start if you have no credit issues now and want a free way to keep an eye on things.
