Credit Monitoring Dilemma

After months of debate and looking at various products, I decided to move forward and purchase Equifax Credit Watch Gold 3-in-1 for my wife and I.

Yes there are ways to get your credit report free (see my post), but I haven’t been able to wait the 3 months to pull each report and want to know about inquiries to my credit report as they happen. With the recent increase in identity theft, I wanted more piece of mind that I know immediately when something hits my credit report.

With the Equifax Credit Watch Gold 3-in-1 we get unlimited access to our Equifax credit report for a year, a yearly 3 in one credit report which is a consolidated report from the 3 credit bureaus, but more importantly we now get real time email updates when a new account is opened. This was the main reason we went with Equifax. The email alerts are also configurable based on % change on an account or if a card is used that has been dormant for a while. Since I open quite a few credit cards to receive the bonuses, I want to make sure that no one has gotten the account info and has started going on a shopping spree.

Now this security isn’t free, I am going to end up paying $12.95 / month. This is why I was having the dilemma. I wanted to have these real time email alerts, but didn’t want to pay for them! But there was no way to do this for free, so I am just going to eat this cost for some piece of mind.  I feel that using this in addition to Yodlee (see my post) will virtually eliminate the risk of identity fraud for us, or at least give us an early warning so we can take care of it before it is too late.

If you don’t want to shell out $13 a month for something like this, at least regularly pull that credit report for free. I’ve seen too many horror stories happen to people that don’t keep an eye on their credit report.