Your credit is important—it’s the key indicator of your financial health. Your creditworthiness is the difference between being able to take out a loan to buy your dream home…or not.
Credit monitoring services keep a close eye on your credit and track changes in your credit reports. If there are significant changes, there are services (such as IDShield) that can alert you immediately. That way, you can take quick action to address suspicious activity by doing things like freezing your credit, changing passwords, and getting in touch with an identity protection specialist.
What is credit monitoring?
Credit monitoring is a way to keep tabs on changes in your financial behavior for the purpose of informing you of your creditworthiness.
- Are there weird new buying patterns with your Visa card?
- Are there strange, out-of-state charges on your Mastercard?
- Did your credit score suddenly drop a significant amount?
- Was a new line of credit taken out under your name?
Good credit monitoring services catch such patterns and immediately let you know.
So, that’s what credit monitoring can do…but it’s also important to recognize what credit monitoring won’t do.
- On its own, monitoring can’t stop an online thief from stealing your identity.
- It can’t prevent fraudsters from continuing to use a stolen identity
- It won’t reverse any action a thief has already taken
The sooner you learn that there are new patterns attributed to you, the sooner you can act to stop it.
Credit monitoring also doesn’t recover your identity if it’s stolen. That’s up to you…or a service like IDShield, which provides full-service identity recovery.
What are the benefits of credit monitoring?
The benefits of credit monitoring include:
- Providing you active feedback on your credit score, helping you make choices to improve your score over time
- Tracking changes to your borrower behavior and notifies you of potential fraud
- Reducing the chances that your credit will be impacted by identity theft
- Giving you peace of mind
What are my credit monitoring options?
Pricing and features of the various services out there vary. Some banks offer free services and the big three credit bureaus—TransUnion, Experian and Equifax—also offer it.
IDShield, one of the world’s leading services, offers continuous credit monitoring and monthly reporting on your credit score from 1 or 3 credit bureaus. It also provides comprehensive ID monitoring, full-service identity restoration, cybersecurity protection (malware & VPN), and up to $1 million in fraud protection.
Do you need credit monitoring?
In a word—yes. You have two options: you can use a service or you can do it yourself. Be aware that doing it on your own requires a ton of work and responsibility—it’s difficult. Keep in mind that the last thing you want is to find out too late that your Social Security number was compromised, or that fraudulent accounts were set up in your name.
IDShield will protect you
IDShield offers best-in-class credit monitoring, personal data monitoring, privacy and reputation management, can help you fix mistakes on credit reports, can help you stop getting credit card offers, and help identify loan fraud. IDShield prides itself on its highly qualified team of professionals, including licensed private investigators, who will help should anything ever go wrong.
Sign up today for either 1 or 3 credit bureau monitoring plus one-on-one consultation.