Checking credit reports at will

nursepower · ‎03-28-2014

I see in the forums people say they just checked their reports and saw X. How do you check it constantly? What service do you use that allows you to access each report immediately when you want it?

NoAnchoviesPlease · ‎03-28-2014

Equifax has the Complete Advantage and others that include unlimited Equifax reports and EQ FAKO scores. I'm sure the other two big CRAs have similar. Some credit cards offer this service (Amex has Score Watch?) as well..

My guess is that people who are eager to see a change update theirs daily, and others may check in after a less-frequent review. For the last week or two I've updated every 2-3 days, since I had some payoffs to watch for. Normally I check 1-2 times a month though.

Also, some of these offer alerting, so you'll get an email or text alert when something has changed, and you can log in, see the update without refreshing your CR, and refresh if you really need to.

I'd be curious to hear if anyone refreshes more than once a day, and if anyone's gotten in trouble for that. I saw someone post here about getting shut down by one of the CRAs for updating too often, but my guess is if you keep it within the navigational beacons, you won't get in trouble.

12/29/2015 669/696/706
01/10/2016 698/711/730 but still to and fro a bit

Climbing to 700 and beyond. It's too cold for gardening.

krial · ‎03-28-2014

I recently signed up for "Eliminate ID Theft" because it lets you pull a "tri-merged" report -- that is, a report from all 3 CRAs combined into one. It clearly marks what information is on which report and lets me see all three updated daily. For the $12/month or whatever paultry sum it was, I'm very happy to be able to keep such a close eye on my credit.

You also get a fako credit score from each CRA, for what it's worth. "The TransUnion TransRisk New Account Credit Score is provided to help you better understand how lenders view your credit report." My FAKO TransUnion score there says 641 and my FICO from Walmart says 693, so as usual it's not the most accurate thing in the world.

Goal: 800, Current Scores: EX 735, EQ 746, TU 745

takeshi74 · ‎03-31-2014

@nursepower wrote:
How do you check it constantly? What service do you use that allows you to access each report immediately when you want it?

Use a CMS that allows for frequent pulls. There's a CMS thread here:

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/t5/General-Credit-Topics/Credit-Monitoring-Service-CMS-Guide/td-p/66254...

They'll have differing timeframes for pulls. As an example, EIDT, mentioned above, allows for daily pulls but not necessarily "immediately when you want it". EIDT literally means 24 hours between pulls -- at least the last time I used it.