Newbie with basic question

[Anonymous]

I'm glad to see there are so many credit experts out there.  I've recently decided to look into my credit report and "clean it up" but am thoroughly confused.  I saw this offer from truecredit.com to provide credit reports and scores for all 3 bureaus but now it appears that what I really need to do is look at my FICO.  However, I don't just want to know my score, I want to seriously monitor and clean up all three reports.  My question is, what is the most efficient (and cheapest) way to monitor all three credit reports and check my score?  I feel that the best way is to use the truecredit.com service to monitor my reports and meanwhile, puchase my FICO score once in a while to check up on it.  What do you all think?  Any advice on what you do will be greatly appreciated!

[haulingthescoreup]

Hi, and welcome to the forums!

That used to be the way to go, back when TC let you pull all three reports every day. Now they only let you pull TU daily, and EQ and EX once a month.

Other than some credit monitoring services which allow members who have been there for a while to pull all three, but new members can only pull once a month or something, the alternative seems to be the Experian-based monitoring services like CreditSecure, which is available to AmEx card holders, and their "Triple Advantage" which is available to everyone.

But congrats on figuring out that this is the way to go: pull your FICO's to see where you're starting from; monitor changes on your reports; learn all you can here about what affects your scores and how much; and use the report changes to guess when it's most useful to pull your FICO's again.

[Anonymous]

Are the scores you get with Credit Secure FICO or FAKO???

Thanks!!

[haulingthescoreup]

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AKCheese wrote:

Are the scores you get with Credit Secure FICO or FAKO???

Thanks!!

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FAKO. Always. Period.

Remember, there is NO source for consumers to find out their FICO EX score, other than through a mortgage app, and through a small CU in Pennsylvania and HSBC Sears and KMart cards. (And I don't know how current those last two are.)

Anyone who offers all three "credit scores" are automatically giving you FAKO's, since the EX is FAKO. That's everyone: CreditSecure, TrueCredit, Chase ID Protection, etc etc etc.