Quarterly monitoring seems useless to me now

[KatherineLee]

I guess Quarterly monitoring isn't doing what I thought it would.  I thought it would alert me whenever a new account was added, or personal information changed.  It has not yet given me alerts about a change in address or two credit line increase, OR a new 15,000 CL from AMEX (new account).  It has been a few months now and Credit Karma picked up on it about 3 weeks after the changes.  

Why pay for a service when Credit Karma will do it for free?

I understand the differences between a FAKO and FICO.  My FAKO is probably 20 points above my true TU FICO, but I really have the monitoring to alert me to changes - and apparently its not very reliable for that.  

Anyone else a bigger fan of Credit Karma?

[llecs]

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@KatherineLee wrote:

I guess Quarterly monitoring isn't doing what I thought it would.  I thought it would alert me whenever a new account was added, or personal information changed.  It has not yet given me alerts about a change in address or two credit line increase, OR a new 15,000 CL from AMEX (new account).  It has been a few months now and Credit Karma picked up on it about 3 weeks after the changes.  

Why pay for a service when Credit Karma will do it for free?

I understand the differences between a FAKO and FICO.  My FAKO is probably 20 points above my true TU FICO, but I really have the monitoring to alert me to changes - and apparently its not very reliable for that.  

Anyone else a bigger fan of Credit Karma?

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I also have TUQM, but it doesn't monitor credit items like account changes, changes in util, changes in score, etc. on any frequency other than quarterly (hence the name of FICO Quarterly Monitoring). The only thing it monitors in between the every-3-month-new-report-pull is your demogrpahic info and I don't think they pull it from your CRs. I too had moved and did get an alert for an address change but I don't know the source. At the same time my CR changed to the new address, then reverted to the old, then the new, then the old, and back and forth (I had let my CCs update the CR for me), yet only received one alert via TUQM despite multiple changes.

IMO, subscribe to TUQM for the FICO not for CR content. Also subscribe for the 20% discount if you need to pull more than once every 3 months. I wouldn't recommend subscribing for the credit monitoring because you can get all 3 CRs monitored for free elsewhere.

[hateAshbury]

quarterly monitoring has been suspect for me when it reported a TransUnion FICO of 731 but a week later I got a denail of credit based on a ... wait for it ... 671 TransUnion FICO . So that quarterly report was pretty much worthless.

I probably am done with quarterly when my current subscription runs out. Will then get my free credit reports each year. At this point (rebuilding credit from a bad streak in 2007-08), my credit is shored up to the point that quarterly reporting -- even if it's reliable, which based on my experience above, I don't believe it to be -- doesn't really add value.

I do use Credit Karma, and it seems much more sensitive to underlying factors that the monitoring service. For instance, when my studnet loans were sold to another servicer, CK picked that up pretty much immediately, showing an immediate credi jump. When a 2-yr hard inquiry aged off, CK reported that within a couple of days, again with the bump.

[GregB]

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@hateAshbury wrote:

quarterly monitoring has been suspect for me when it reported a TransUnion FICO of 731 but a week later I got a denail of credit based on a ... wait for it ... 671 TransUnion FICO . So that quarterly report was pretty much worthless.

I probably am done with quarterly when my current subscription runs out. Will then get my free credit reports each year. At this point (rebuilding credit from a bad streak in 2007-08), my credit is shored up to the point that quarterly reporting -- even if it's reliable, which based on my experience above, I don't believe it to be -- doesn't really add value.

I do use Credit Karma, and it seems much more sensitive to underlying factors that the monitoring service. For instance, when my studnet loans were sold to another servicer, CK picked that up pretty much immediately, showing an immediate credi jump. When a 2-yr hard inquiry aged off, CK reported that within a couple of days, again with the bump.

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So your choice is to go from a TU FICO that is one major revision earlier than most lenders use to a score that no lender of any kind uses for anything?

Without knowing what kind of lender quoted your 671 TU FICO, we have no way to even guess which TU FICO they used.

CK is great for monitoring changes to your reports for free but you are wasting your time to look at the scores.

I think Scorewatch is a much better choice than TU Quarterly since it gives you the exact EQ FICO used for virtually all mortgage applications and many other credit apps.