Monitoring my Fico score

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone.  I started the rebuilding process a few months ago.  Have not really pulled my reports or scores again (yet).  I originally signed up for the free trial of Score Watch to get my score and that's how I learned my score took a 100 point dive over the summer due to falling behind on my bills. 

Anyway, I am GW'ing the lates and have had little success, but my biggest goal is just paying down debt.  I just paid off my car (yay), but my score dropped even more (30 more points).  I went from 691 in May 2008 to now a 536 which is just horrid.

What should I buy to get my scores monthly?  Do people really shell out $48 for every score every single month?  I know this is important stuff, and I've learned a lot, but I can't afford that right now.  I'm just wondering if I missed something as far as what services to purchase.  This process is really eye-opening, but depressing and really gets you down, but I'm trying to keep my head up.

Any advice is appreciated.  Thanks in advance!

ex-

[Not_the_Point]

I am subscribed to Score Watch and get an update every couple of weeks when one of the Score Watch alerts goes off. No way I would be paying out $50 a month to be receiving my reports every month... Score watch is something like $9/month and you get a couple of Equifax reports per year along with the system sending you an alert when your Equifax score changes or when there is new information being reported on your credit report.

It's a pretty nice system if you want to monitor your credit on the cheap.

You might want to just work on paying down your debt and maybe buy up the 3 scores every 6 months or so to see how you're doing and lay out a plan for the next 6 months... you'll get some indication of how you're doing via the Score Watch alerts. You could also try getting a secured credit card with WaMu to make use of the free TU monitoring they offer, but you would have to shell out a couple hundred bucks as a deposit and if you're very strapped for cash that's probably not practical.

Good luck!

[llecs]

---

exquizite wrote:

Hi everyone.  I started the rebuilding process a few months ago.  Have not really pulled my reports or scores again (yet).  I originally signed up for the free trial of Score Watch to get my score and that's how I learned my score took a 100 point dive over the summer due to falling behind on my bills. 

Anyway, I am GW'ing the lates and have had little success, but my biggest goal is just paying down debt.  I just paid off my car (yay), but my score dropped even more (30 more points).  I went from 691 in May 2008 to now a 536 which is just horrid.

What should I buy to get my scores monthly?  Do people really shell out $48 for every score every single month?  I know this is important stuff, and I've learned a lot, but I can't afford that right now.  I'm just wondering if I missed something as far as what services to purchase.  This process is really eye-opening, but depressing and really gets you down, but I'm trying to keep my head up.

Any advice is appreciated.  Thanks in advance!

ex-

---

It depends on how serious you want to pursue repair. I knew from the beginning it would cost a bit, but I also knew I'd save tens of thousands if it resulted in a lower mortgage or auto rate. In other words, I would save more money by spending more now, if that makes sense.

I pull all 3 FICO reports 2x per month between DW and myself. With discount codes (google them; against the rules to post them), my price is down to $30-something per set of 3 reports. I also pull a hard copy of each CR directly from each CRA every other month. I'll sometimes have to pay for EQ, but TU and EX are free. And I also subscribe to a CMS. Aside from SW, we use TC and creditchecktotal. Both alert me to this or that and we use those to pull a new report via myFICO to see the score change as needed.

Doing all of this saved us thousands already. When we started, the best mortgage interest rate we could hope for was 11%. Now we are around 6% should we decide to buy a home now. That's a lot of money. 

[Anonymous]

So, if I remember correctly, when you do SW, you get your FICO score as of the day you purchase SW and then they system will let you know if your scores change, but your do not literally see your score updated, correct?

I think maybe what I will do is buy all 3 for now along with SW and work toward purchasing again in 6 months.  That sounds like a good plan.  Thanks for the advice.

Any other advice is welcome!

[llecs]

If you get a SW alert regarding a change in score, you will see that via the e-mailed alert and you will see it when you login to this site.

I buy all 3 in conjunction with SW because SW doesn't catch every score-changing event. Aside from seeing EQ only, SW won't alert you for major event like a baddie falling off or an account anniversary. While it will check your EQ score from time to time, IMO, it is unreliable. However, still a great resource to catch most changes and to get a discount of $10.95 for all of your EQ reports.

[iamrayl]

I pay $9.95 per month for True Credit monitoring service.  That allows me to pull fresh reports every 24hrs + 1 minute.  If I notice a major change on those reports then I might be inclined to pull the real FICO scores (from Equifax SW not the myfico SW) since the True Credit service only gives FAKO scores but that system has worked really well for me and also saved me lots of money.  When I first found myfico I used to pull my reports for all 3 bureaus 2 - 3x per month.  There are other services out there that provide similar services to True Credit.  I believe Chase offers a service that also allows you to fresh reports every 24 hours for $11.99 per month.