I need help in choosing the right product

[Anonymous]

I am looking to find a credit monitoring service where I can monitor all 3 credit reports and all 3 FICO scores (NOT credit scores) anytime.

All I find is either one time purchase of them all OR monitoring all 3 credit reports plus 1 FICO OR monitoring all 3 credit reports with 3 credit scores (not FICO).

Any suggestions please? 

[MidnightVoice]

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vardanp wrote:

I am looking to find a credit monitoring service where I can monitor all 3 credit reports and all 3 FICO scores (NOT credit scores) anytime.

All I find is either one time purchase of them all OR monitoring all 3 credit reports plus 1 FICO OR monitoring all 3 credit reports with 3 credit scores (not FICO).

Any suggestions please? 

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Sorry, but what do you mean by "all 3 FICO scores (NOT credit scores)"?

[Dawn]

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vardanp wrote:

I am looking to find a credit monitoring service where I can monitor all 3 credit reports and all 3 FICO scores (NOT credit scores) anytime.

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None of the monitoring services monitor all 3 CRAs as well as provide all 3 FICO scores. 

When you want all 3 genuine FICO scores, you end up purchasing the extras (or all 3) separately.

[Anonymous]

By credit score I mean the score that the credit bureaus create (which is not FICO).

I am looking for a monitoring service (not a one time purchase) of all 3 FICO scores with all 3 credit bureaus. Where I can go in anytime and monitor my FICO scores (all 3) and my credit reports (all3).

Thanks.

[haulingthescoreup]

Hi, vardanp, welcome to the forums!

There's a huge market for what you're describing, but unfortunately, there isn't an affordable version. The CRA's charge FICO a good-sized chunk of change for pulling a FICO score, so no one can come up with an on-going monitoring service for all three that would be affordable. Scorewatch (which follows EQ) is the closest there is. The quarterly monitoring service keeps an eye on your TU reports for evidence of fraud, but I think that it only updates your scores quarterly. EX barely agrees to play ball at all with FICO --if you pull all three FICO score reports, you'll see that EX doesn't tell you what you're doing right on screen 2, and they don't provide a simulator.

What most of us wind up doing (after an awful lot of trial and error and false starts) is to buy a so-called 3-in-1 credit monitoring service like TrueCredit, CreditSecure, etc. and keep an eye on our reports with up-to-daily pulls. With time and a lot of reading on these forums, you learn which changes on your reports are apt to result in FICO score changes, and you then decide whether you want to buy your FICO's. And you quickly learn that the scores on the 3-in-1's (what you were calling "credit scores") are truly FAKO's, and not predictive of diddly-squat. So we ignore the scores, and use the reports.

I have both TrueCredit and Scorewatch from myFICO. I have learned (mostly) when it's worth pulling and when it's not, and btw, "worth" is very subjective. Normal people would think I'm crazy for pulling my scores as often as I do, but I'm fascinated with trying to figure out the logic behind the scores. What I stumbled across is that if you buy Scorewatch (which offers discounted EQ FICO's) and the Suze product from here, you can elect to pull only your EX and TU scores through Suze, since you already get the EQ scores through Scorewatch. This does result in a little bit of cost savings. Note the quotes around "little."