Credit and FICO Monitoring

[Anonymous]

HI,

 I'm in the process of rebuilding my credit and have gone from the 520s to 630's.  You can say morniting my credit has become an obsession, lol.

What service do you use to monitor all three scores long term? I've been paying equifax and got a TU report too, but I was wondering what other options are out there that also update my score.  thanks.

[Anonymous]

I think CCT (credit check total) is best for seeing all 3 scores.  And you get to pull your reports monthly.  

[Anonymous]

Depends on what your goals are and your budget is.

Some people are cool with dropping $15, $30, $60+ per month on monitoring services because they like to look at their reports and data every single day.

Others don't spend a penny and monitor their reports with free services like Credit Karma and free annual reports and get monthly FICO score updates from Discover, their credit card companies, mortgage providers, etc. 

Neither method is really right/wrong or better/worse - it's all about what suits you best personally. 

IMO, watching your credit score every day or even every week is kind of like watching the scale when you're trying to lose weight.  Most will tell you check it once a month or you may get discouraged, frustrated or annoyed when you may not see what you want or see an up/down fluctuation.  Again though, it's different for everyone.

[RonM21]

I agree, which ever suits you best for your situation. I use CCT.

[takeshi74]

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@Anonymous wrote:

What service do you use to monitor all three scores long term? I've been paying equifax and got a TU report too, but I was wondering what other options are out there that also update my score.  thanks.

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I don't really use one.  I purchase from myFICO as needed/desired and that's rare.  I do get some FICO models from credit products such as a TU FICO 8 from Discover, EX FICO 8 from AmEx & Discover Score Card, & EQ FICO NG from PenFed.

Keep in mind that there isn't just one FICO model so you need to pay attention to the specific models offered and the specific models that you want.  If you want to know where you stand score-wise with a given creditor/product then you need to know the model & CRA that they use in their decision and go get that specific score.

Don't just consider scores and models though.  Consider thing like the fact that myFICO is a trigger based service.  It only provides updates when there is trigger activity on your reports.  Not all activity with a scoring impact is a trigger.

Also, don't overlook existing threads.  Monitoring services that provide reports and scores are a very common topic.

I highly recommend that you learn to assess your report data and focus on your reports instead of just obsessing over numbers.  You'll want to be able to do this to better understand where you are and how to get to where you want to be as well as how your decisions impact your credit.  Any scoring model uses the data in a report to generate a score.  Good reports will lead to good scores.