Best credit monitoring company?

[jp2861]

I finally filed and on the 1st I want to subscribe to a credit monitoring company so I can start the cleanup chores. If anyone is using one I'd be interested in hearing the pro's and con's of your experiences thus far.

Thanks

[Flamingo]

I finally filed and on the 1st I want to subscribe to a credit monitoring company so I can start the cleanup chores. If anyone is using one I'd be interested in hearing the pro's and con's of your experiences thus far.

Thanks

A credit monitoring company only monitors your credit and sends you monthly notices whether or not there has been any activitity on your credit reports. There is a monthly charge unless you have another service that you are a member of that provides it for free (i.e., Paypal, employer, bank, etc.). There are credit repair services that some swear by and others say are rip offs; some charging hundreds a year for things you can do for free. The best thing to do to start cleaning up your reports is to request your free copies of all three credit reports. Go to annualcreditreport.com. You can either manually request the reports through the mail (print out the form to mail in) or do it online. I suggest getting the hard reports in the mail. Each year you can get your reports free this way. Otherwise, unless you are denied credit, you will have to pay for either a service to provide you the reports or pay for each separately through the CRAs. When you get them in, review them and see what is going on. The information on this forum for clean up measures is priceless so review the suggestions in the appropriate column.

[rrockinggramma]

I have been using the transunion product called TruCredit for daily monitoring. But not being satisfied with just one service, I also signed up for the Equifax Gold service which monitors just equifax. And I have ScoreWatch from Myfico.com. SW only monitors your score from equifax. TruCredit will give you all 3 reports but the scores are fako scores. Only the myfico site will give you actual scores but it costs to pull them each time (except for scorewatch which notifies you when your score goes up or down) The clean up process can be expensive. SW is 8.95 a month, TU is 12.95 a month and Equifax is 9. 95 a month. Experian offers a product as well. TU will shut you off I guess if you pull too many times (I have been pulling 3/4 times a week now cause I am looking for changes) but it is suppose to be unlimited pulls for your monthly fee.

[jp2861]

I don't think the "once a year" suggestion is what I'm looking for. I would like to take a look at the reports of all 3 at least once a week until I get it all cleaned up.

I'm not so concerned with scores at this point. I'm more interested in making sure that all 3 are accurate and match, as much as it's possible.

Hopefully, other will chime in with their experiences.

[sandhall]

after you have made a dispute no reason to look at them until the dispute is settled which is 30 to 45 days depending if they ask for you to verify who you are. Good luck getting them to all match. Really they all have a different system I guess to verify I have been working on getting my BK chapter 7 to say discharged from equifax and had no luck Transunion is the same way experian was easy after your second round of disputes all seem to lock you up with the this a firvolous dispute letter even when I mailed in my disputes so i have now sent them a letter with what should be corrected and the date i would like it to be corrected or I will file a complaint with the FTC. It is hard to get them to atleast report it the correct way. But stay on your toes somehow it gets done

[Flamingo]

I don't think the "once a year" suggestion is what I'm looking for. I would like to take a look at the reports of all 3 at least once a week until I get it all cleaned up.

I'm not so concerned with scores at this point. I'm more interested in making sure that all 3 are accurate and match, as much as it's possible.

Hopefully, other will chime in with their experiences.

We've been trying to get ours to "match" and cleaned up for 1 1/2 years after BK and it takes time. If you keep after them too much about the same dispute, you will get, as the other poster mentioned, get letters from the CRAs stating your claim is frivilous and that they are reporting correctly and that you will have to contact the creditor directly. Then there have been times when items have been corrected and three months later go back to the way they were to begin with. We even had new items opened after our BK discharge turn up as being in BK! It's terribly frustrating so don't think you will be able to do it by monitoring your reports weekly. Your BK will remain on your reports for quite some time so there is really no rush in worrying about cleaning it up quickly.

[rrockinggramma]

It is true that the CRA's are very slow with the cleanup process and I think some of the creditors do what they can to slow it up by making it more difficult by reporting those late balances on your credit report. But I have found that a lot of my stuff has been coming along pretty well. I filed a chapter 7 in 01 so this is the year I have loads of stuff coming off my report anyway. Starting in March thru December I will lose 6 collection accounts, 4 "IIB" cc accounts. It is my chapter 13 stuff that will stay on my report for quite a while now and those are the ones that I am having trouble getting changed to zero balance. They keep wanting to say 2000 past due, even when being paid in the BK.
Experian just verified a judgement that has been removed from both my Equifax and TU so I sent them a MOV letter (method of verification) to ask them how it was verified by them. Will see what develops with that. But I am enjoying this because it gives me something to look forward to each day the mail comes.

[afterbk]

I had great result using experian. com. It actually really saved me on a couple different occasions by noticing something on my debt consolidation program I had not noticed that would have killed me.