Credit monitoring services are security products to monitor credit history in order to prevent or detect any suspicious activity that could be related to identity theft. They are useful to keep track of credit movements as well as to protect our credit details from being stolen. Also, most credit monitoring providers offer the possibility of checking our personal credit score, which means we can know how we are rated and how successful we would be when applying for extra credit.
What a credit monitoring service is good at?
There are three main reasons why a credit monitoring service seems to be useful. First of all, because helps us to keep an eye on any credit activity, warning us when something unusual or suspicious happens. In many cases if what we pay covers that, they will track the Internet looking for our personal information. If anything is found, we are contacted and actions are taken to ensure we are safe from thieves. These are basically security features that work as protective walls against anyone trying to access our credit information to commit fraud.
As we said before, one of these services’ utilities is the access to our credit score. This can save us time and embarrassment if we are thinking of taking some extra credit but we are not sure we comply with the banks’ or credit companies’ requirements. By using this as part of our credit monitoring, we will find out when is the best time to apply for credit or when we need to start making some adjustments in order to pay back what we owe and keep a clean credit history.
Which credit monitoring service should we go for?
As always when recommending financial products, it depends on every individual’s circumstances. We need to determine what we need it for and what use we will make of each one of the utilities they offer. Considering that, we will have to find the balance between what we want to pay for and how much we want/will have to pay for.
We should bear in mind one of the scariest scenarios nowadays is the possibility our personal details are stolen from the internet and sold to people who will make a fraudulent use of them. Some famous cases came to public knowledge recently so every effort to avoid that affecting us must be made.
All-included packs are available at prices from around $30/month which should be seen as an investment. For that price, we can get up to $1 million reimbursement in case our money is stolen! People pay for home security systems that keep burglars away from them and their families so why do not keep virtual thieves away from our data?
