What You Need to Know About Credit Monitoring

If your credit score is on a neutral level, it is easier to have it improved than have a negative score fixed. If you want to monitor on a regular basis the credit score, you must keep abreast of every changes made to your account. This will insure you have not fallen for any of the cybercrimes, especially identity theft and phishing.

If you monitor your credit standing, you will have information recorded under your name. This information ranges from payments made on your credit card dues to unauthorized loans made against your name. Having knowledge the instant a crime has been committed against you, you can do something quickly to avoid those activities marring your record.

Too, credit monitoring will give you clear understanding on how different activities can impact your financial reputation and credit score. For example, do you know the effect if you missed just one payment for your credit card? Or when you made a delayed payment on your loan? If you want to build or maintain a good standing financially, you have to start monitoring your credit.

Getting Your Credit Reports for Free

Before you can get started on credit monitoring, you need to get a copy of your credit report. Every year, there are three credit reports released by each agency in the United States. These reports are issued for free and upon request by the Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. This has become a custom since the enactment of the Fair Credit Reporting Act in the United States of America.

By having three copies from all credit monitoring agencies every year, you can do you monitoring and see if everything that has been written about you is true. There are many cases where errors are made or illegal transactions are committed against the innocent consumers. If such unfortunate thing happens, you have to make an immediate action before that transaction is recorded and affect your financial image.

Paying for a Credit Monitoring

Some consumers may not have the luxury of time to do the credit monitoring themselves that they have to employ professionals to do it for them. Today, there are hundreds of agencies or private individuals who are willing to do a report—written or oral—about any suspicious activity or changes made on any of the three credit report issued within a year. These individuals or offices will do real time analysis on each section of the credit report.It is part of their duty to report updates on the public records, changes in the employment, new loans taken, credit inquiries, liens and delinquencies, and the “black marks.”

Benefits & Drawbacks

If your credit monitoring is well-documented, you are in control of your financial status and of any circumstance that may be involved about it. Having knowledge about what is happening about your finances is power.

On the other hand, if you will not perform any monitoring—that is, you may have a copy of your credit reports but you will not scrutinize through each of them—then you will not know whether a fraud or identity theft has been committed against you. If, somehow, an identity theft get hold of your personal information and used it to obtain loan against your name, and no monthly payments have been made for that loan, it will have a huge negative impact on your credit report. Of course, you will never know if you are a victim, unless you pay attention to your credit report.