Continued from Part 1 of Credit Monitoring and Identity Theft…

Credit monitoring services help because it can take a lot of your time when you follow up on monitoring your credit reports yourself. The FACTA act, offering the provision of annual free reports from the agencies, would have you thinking once a year would be okay for checking it, which is better than not at all, but in fact, once a year is not enough.

Experts in the field would advise checking at least twice a year to see if your credit report has anything unusual or inaccurate in it, which would be fine if you knew you weren’t at risk. What do you mean at risk? Well, if you actively use credit and perhaps someone other than you knows or has access to that vital piece of bureaucracy – your personal Social Security Number – maybe a quarterly review would be more prudent.

On average, credit reporting agencies update credit reports around once a quarter. It might be more frequent if your circumstances have a sudden influx of credit activity within a short period of time. If this is the timetable for professional credit reporting agencies, you should follow the same schedule.

The monitoring process will first of all require you to make a request for your report then you will need to review each entry for accuracy. They can be a bit confusing and difficult to read if you’re not sure what you’re looking for. Remember to request a copy of each agency report. Oh dear, that does sound like a lot of admin – doesn’t it?

This is where your credit monitoring service comes in. Generally, most of the credit monitoring services will offer to monitor all your credit reports for you at regular intervals, and will report any change/s to you. ‘Regular intervals’, however, can vary from monitoring service to monitoring service. Some will offer credit report reviews either monthly or quarterly yet others might only do a review of your report perhaps every four or six months, or perhaps even just once a year (don’t take up with these ones!).

>>>  Read Part 3 of Credit Monitoring and Identity Theft  >>>