Welcome!
As you may know, there are a couple of ways you can pull your FICO report w/ score through this website. You can purchase via FICO® Standard for EQ and/or TU and get a one-time snapshot of your credit at that moment. These reports don't update at all and are available for 30 days I believe.
Another way is through FICO® Quarterly Monitoring. This service (aka TUQM) is for TU only and is basically a pre-paid plan to get 4 FICO Standard reports for TU on a quarterly basis. It has some added features that tend to come in handy from time to time too. These reports also do not update, but you basically get a new TU report every 3 months at a discount which helps. Also it monitors TU in that it will not track credit items (e.g. increased balances), but will alert you to important demographic changes (e.g. potential fraud issues).
The last way is through Score Watch®. SW monitors EQ only and tracks for changes in increased balances, added inquiries, added baddies, changes in account statuses, and so on. There's a ScoreWatch Guide floating around in myFICO Product Feedback board. There is a drawback in that SW will not alert you to decreased balances or dropped baddies. However, there is a FICO monitoring aspect to it and it tracks changes to your EQ FICO. It won't specifically tell you why your score changed, but if you set your Target Score in the Settings to EXACTLY match your latest EQ FICO, then you'll get alerted to changes to your EQ FICO as it happens. Plus, you have to reset that Target score every time your score changes. You'd have to pull your EQ report from somewhere to see those exact reasons to any score change, if known. With SW, you get 2 EQ FICO reports per year. One must be used when you subscribe and the other is available right away if you pay annually or available after a couple months if paying monthly. You also get 30% off all future EQ FICO report purchases. Like with the other FICO products, the reports don't update, but the score will if you set that Target score exactly right.
The other service is Suze Orman's FICO kit. That's basically a prepaid plan to purchase any FICO report (3 of EQ, 3 of TU, or a combination of 3 of the two) whenever you want.
It can get expensive pulling new reports. I'd suggest googling "myFICO discount codes" for extra savings. I'm in the middle of the mortgage and pull 3x/month, times 2 reports each, times 2 of us (DW and I), times the cost $16(?). If you do the math, the price can really add up. To help offset it, we subscribe to a credit monitoring service that tracks those changes to the report and after we close, then we'll only pull when there's a major change to our report.
Starting Score: 570
