Just a little advice needed....

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone! After my last app, my scores have went extremely yucky low. I'm going to be in the garden for a very long while bc I have everything I need for now anyways. Should I freeze all 3 cb's? I never done it in the past so I'm not even sure of how to do it and if that is a good enough reason to do it. But for precautionary reasons, I'm thinking I should freeze them. Any advice?

Also, I'm thinking of getting rid of my Experian subscription. I have the Exp.subscription, a MyFico monthly subscription, and my discover and amex cards shows my score for free. Along with them, I have the insubstantial fako scores on credit karma, credit wise, and another with my Chase card. I think I read somewhere before Penfed has a score too but I haven't found it on the website yet. I might be wrong. I dont know. However, I think my Experian subscription is not worth the payment anymore. Unless, they have something the others dont offer that I dont know about that I might need. Any pointers on this would be helpful too.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

You plan to be in the garden for a very long time.  Great choice.  Because you plan to do that, and because you are asking about how to trim unnecessary spending on credit monitoring tools, my advice is to scrap ALL tools that charge you money, especially the expensive myFICO Ultimate, which is likely charging you $480 per year.

You can achieve all the monitoring you need through free tools (including but not limited to the free scores that come from credit cards).

[Anonymous]

For $9.95/month, I think Experian is well worth keeping especially in your situation where you're looking to freeze the CRA, it offers credit and darkweb monitoring, daily report and FICO8 update but most of all, you get credit lock instead of dealing with freeze/unfreeze and all the pain that comes with.

Next I would signup for Transunion's TruIdentity, free monitoring service that provides daily TU report update and credit lock for TU.

EQ is a little more complicated, if you had signed up for their free TrustedId Premier after their data breach last year, you would get the EQ version of TU's free TrueIdentity, daily report update and EQ credit lock.  If you didn't, you can purchase the most basic TU or EQ subscriptions (about $9.95/month), either one will give you credit lock for both TU and EQ.  If you don't want to pay for the subscription, you can just freeze EQ.

In any case, I would forgo myfico subscription and save a tone, the only time I can see it being useful is the months leading up to a new mortgage.