Is Paying For Credit Monitoring Worth The Expense?

By Author: William Hauselberg
Total Articles: 816
Comment this article

To have a company continually watch and monitor an individual's personal credit report doesn't really make much sense. This is what a multitude of credit monitoring businesses actually claim to do. But for both the short and long term, these paid services truly have no substantive financial or psychological value to the consumer.

Why Pay High Fees?

The cost to have a credit reports monitored can easily soar to over $100 a year. This can be seen as a financial outrage on their part since what they do can be accomplished much cheaper by anybody. All a person has to do is regularly contact the three major credit bureaus to gain any information they may want or need.

This includes either free or very low cost access to their FICO score, credit reports, and their entire credit files if they wish. Credit monitoring services state that they will be very watchful over a person's credit report. They claim that they'll notify the consumer whenever a change occurs on the report or if there is any suspicion of identity theft or other fraudulent financial activity. But access to Credit Score Information is very easy ...
... to do on one's own.

And the fees paid to them don't truly guarantee that they'll actually be always on top of every little fluctuation in a person's report because these fluctuations occur nearly on a daily basis as account information from creditors continually pour in to the credit bureaus whenever an update is given from a consumer's payment history on each account. It's important to realize that individuals can do a better job on their own if they just take a little time every so often to perform some simple due diligence into their credit files.

Long Term Results of Credit Monitoring Services

In the long run, credit monitoring services can be quite flawed. This can be the result of computerized errors when they're claiming to intimately follow and track a person's overall credit status. Mistakes can also easily be made by the staff that works at these credit monitoring agencies. This can be the result of a lack of comprehensive professional training, a lack of experience, or just a laziness and apathetic attitude on the staff's part because it's not their own personal credit file that's on the line.

These errors made by the credit monitoring companies can negatively affect an individual's credit file even more than a poor personal payment history or identity theft itself. As a result, it's definitely much better to regularly access one's credit score information since a stronger personal interest is vested in it.

It is very much important to access one’s credit score information regularly. The author has a great deal of knowledge about credit reports.