@Anonymous wrote:I have never had a MF membership, but regarding alerts I feel it's worth noting that many people on this forum state that free sources (Credit Sesame, Credit Karma, etc) provide alerts quicker than does MF.
Statistically I'm not sure that's the case, I've had both scenarios personally though I've never tried to track the alerts for that, but I can state I got more alerts with myFICO than CK or any of the free services.
The monitoring solutions use different methods for acquiring the data which impacts their speed, and speaking objectively I'm not sure I care about timeliness other than inquiry reporting as that has some value in catching abuse. AFAIK nearly all of them catch inquiries in the same time frame to your point on value admittedly.
Delay in a balance reporting though? That's just a function of our being too intrinsically tied, probably to this forum, doesn't have much real world meaning.
@Anonymous wrote:
@Revelate wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:I have never had a MF membership, but regarding alerts I feel it's worth noting that many people on this forum state that free sources (Credit Sesame, Credit Karma, etc) provide alerts quicker than does MF.
Statistically I'm not sure that's the case, I've had both scenarios personally though I've never tried to track the alerts for that, but I can state I got more alerts with myFICO than CK or any of the free services.
I wasn't talking statistics, nor did I state that that free sources provide more alerts... I was talking quicker alerts, meaning if the same alert comes from one of those free sources verses MF. I also didn't state that this is true of the majority, simply that "many people" on this forum have posted about their free source alerts coming faster.
I think you misread my post senor, or maybe I didn't write it as well as I could've.
The free source alerts are not consistently faster in my experience, depending on when the change happens and depending on the service's implementation, will determine how quickly that individual service gets the change.
That's what I was talking about regarding statistics regarding the speed of alerting: forum anecdotal reports are just that, and nobody reports when the myFICO paid service is faster because it's just expected. The volume of alerts was just an added piece.
Ultimately without some sort of statistical analysis datapoints are pretty meaningless for making the assertion that one is faster than the other consistently in my opinion.
The rest: I'd argue how much speed even matters - volume and accuracy are arguably more important. TT brought up a salient point, if you're just monitoring the report data and doesn't matter really the volume of alerts, go free, but if you want more data and more frequent touch points then look to a paid service. I think that's a good rational way to look at it personally.
@Anonymous if you haven’t used the MF alerting / tracking / scoring / identify theft monitoring services, with all due respect you probably shouldn’t be commenting on them.
@Anonymous wrote:
@NRB525 wrote:
@Anonymousif you haven’t used the MF alerting / tracking / scoring / identify theft monitoring services, with all due respect you probably shouldn’t be commenting on them.And with all due respect back, I think that's ridiculous. This forum is about the transfer of information. If I've read something a dozen times on here about a certain topic and someone in another thread is discussing that topic, there's no reason not to relay the information I've read a dozen times prior. I've never used a predatory lender. Should I then never comment on one if it comes up in discussion? If someone has never used Credit Karma, should they not point out to someone else that their scores provided are not FICO scores because they have no personal experience using CK? If you've never experienced the score-drop associated with closing out your only installment loan, should you never comment on it even though you've read it 100 times on here because it wasn't something you've had personal experience with? I see zero issue at all with passing on already-posted information. If you go back and reread my post, you'll see that's exactly what I did, referencing what many others have said. I never said "Just so you know, free CMS's provide faster alerts than MF" as if I was posting from personal experience. Others can make their own decisions and look into things further if they'd like.
As we are seeing on the other thread regarding “Overall utilization of 6%, is it a Thing?” you do not have a complete picture of how FICO 8 works, because you have not invested the subscription fee to get at-the-moment updates from scoring events on your own file such as significant changes in individual card utilization. That is what a MF subscription gets you, which you do not realize.
For many of your other examples, sure, we can agree advice like “fees on CreditOne should be avoided” is good advice without opening a CreditOne account.
Repeating advice like “Individual card utilization changing from 25% to 1% may not change score” just tells me you don’t have a real time picture, in your own experience, to understand one of the most common reasons for score changes. If your view to scoring is coming from casual users here, without digging in to clarify what is going on, to surface the real score factors in each case, and you don’t have that baseline of personal experience, you risk getting poor data points, then thinking those must be useful, when they are just random, unconfirmed comments.
Generally, this leads to people repeating AZEO as a method, without understanding what is fundamentally going on in AZEO ( low utilization on all cards and individual cards ). They spend a lot of time trying to keep all amounts below 8.9%, and panic when a charge just before statement cut causes a second card to report a balance ( “It will tank my score!!!” ) because they don’t see that such minor changes in their profile are a #shrug event on FICO 8.