Which credit monitoring services are reputable?

January 18, 2014 5:31 PM

I'm looking for a credit monitoring service that will let me retrieve my full credit report once every 2 weeks. I'm okay with a < $20 monthly fee. I just want to know which services aren't a scam.

I was a monthly member of PrivacyGuard, because I could get a fresh credit report any time I chose. I would get one about every other week and look through it. (It's an OC thing, but it makes me happy.) A while ago they restricted users to one report every 6 months (due to the abuse from people checking reports every 30 seconds - no idea, but that's what the forums reported).

I've googled for reviews, but this particular market is so over SEO'd that I can't really trust any results. That's where I'm starting from.

The sites I've been looking at are:
trustedid.com
credit.com
myfico.com
identityguard.com

I know lifelock.com has their comical issues, so I'm skipping them.
And there's always Mint.com's offering.

The bottom line is: I'm looking for a service that for a monthly fee (up to $20 a month) will give me credit reports from all 3 agencies, every 2 weeks. I don't really need scores, but that would be a nice bonus. I just want a full list of what the agencies have as my file (I can mostly do the math on my own).

posted by BenevolentActor to Shopping (7 answers total)

What specifically are you trying to do? If you're concerned about the data breaches, you might want to pull your free one from the government and then put a credit freeze on yourself instead.

The big three are Transunion, Equifax, and Experian.
posted by tilde at 5:36 PM on January 18, 2014

Transunion's credit monitoring service lets you do this for $17.95. It lets you see a side-by-side summary of TU, Equifax, and Experian data.
posted by TG_Plackenfatz at 5:50 PM on January 18, 2014

Response by poster: Just to clarify: I'm not worried about the Target data breaches (or any other). I just want to be able to get my full credit report every couple of weeks, in the way the that old PrivacyGuard would do. I don't need scores.
posted by BenevolentActor at 5:55 PM on January 18, 2014

Last year, I used Credit Check Monitoring Premium through USAA and I got them to upgrade me to having unlimited pulls per month (instead of just one) from the Big Three by simply requesting it - I told them I was specifically interested in credit rebuilding and needed more than 1 "refresh" per month. It ended up being about 17 bucks per month.
posted by sm1tten at 11:02 PM on January 18, 2014

I believe Credit Secure from American Express may meet your requirements and monthly rate, but check the fine print, I may have missed something.
posted by forthright at 12:40 AM on January 19, 2014

Yeah, the amex credit secure does what you want.
posted by J. Wilson at 7:30 AM on January 19, 2014

Response by poster: Awesome, thanks. The Amex service looks like exactly what I want. Now I just need to finally accept an Amex card.
posted by BenevolentActor at 8:45 AM on January 19, 2014