FreeCreditScore.com
Posted: October 26, 2011 | Last Updated: January 5, 2012
| Free Scores | Experian PLUS Score |
| Trial Info | 7 day free trial |
| Price After Trial | $14.95/mo |
| Credit Reports Monitored | Experian |
| ID Theft Coverage | $50,000 |
Key Features
- Free Experian Credit Score
- Daily Credit Monitoring
- 2 Free Score Updates per Month
- Alerts of Key Changes to Credit
- $50,000 Identity Theft Coverage
- 7 day free trial, $14.95/mo thereafter
Pros: Low cost credit monitoring, frequent credit score updates (twice a month) is a big plus.
Cons: Doesn't provide all 3 credit scores.
When looking for your free credit score, FreeCreditScore.com must be mentioned as a top choice for obvious reasons. Not only do they provide your Free Experian Credit Score with your free trial, they also let you have 2 free score updates per month, which is significantly more frequent than most other services. On top of that they provide daily credit report monitoring so you can stay on top of your credit, and guard against identity theft.
Free Credit Score and Free Trial
FreeCreditScore.com offers a free credit score upon sign-up, with your 7 day free trial. This means you can sign up and get your free credit score and try their service for 7 days, at no cost to you. During your free trial, if you have checked out all the features and benefits, and decided it’s not for you, you can cancel your account (which means you pay nothing) and keep your free credit score, just for giving it a try. That’s the beauty of the free trial.
Standout Feature – FreeCreditScore.com’s Score Center
One of the great things about this service is that you receive your free credit score upon sign up, along with great features to track and monitor your credit score, and how it changes over time. They call this your “Score Center”. With it, you can set automatic alerts to e-mail you when your score goes up or down a certain number of points, or if your credit score hits or passes a certain mark. For example, you can set it to immediately alert you if your score rises above 720, or if it changes by more than 10 points, up or down.
Score Center will also tell you what factors are affecting your credit score the most, and provide tips on what actions are best to take to maintain or improve your score. Credit score monitoring can be especially helpful if you are trying to raise your credit score to a certain level. Your score updates twice per month, so you can quickly see how your score is affected by different actions you take, and you can visually track it over time with the easy to read, interactive graphs provided by this service.
With this tool, you can also estimate how different actions and/or behaviors will affect your credit score over time. Let’s say you want to pay down one of your credit cards, the estimator tool will tell you what effect this would have on your credit score. It can estimate the effect of many things such as bankruptcy, delinquent accounts, a change in credit card balances and more.
Credit Monitoring and Alerts
Owned by Experian (as is ProtectMyID.com) FreeCreditScore.com provides you access to Experian’s credit monitoring system, called Triple Advantage. This service monitors your Experian credit file for key changes to your credit report, and notifies you of those changes by e-mail or text message, so you’re never left in the dark about your credit. This is an important tool in protecting yourself against identity theft.
Identity Theft Protection
Most of the time a change to your credit report will simply be something you caused yourself, such as a change in credit card balances or a new loan account. However, certain changes to your credit report that you don’t recognize, could indicate identity theft. So it’s important to have a daily credit monitoring service, such as Triple Advantage, constantly watching your credit reports for changes.
Identity Theft Resolution and Coverage
If for some reason you are a victim of identity theft while a member of FreeCreditReport.com, they will assign you a fraud resolution specialist to help you resolve the problem. They will also provide you with $50,000 in ID theft coverage, if you suffer losses from an identity thief.
Bottom Line
If you’re looking for low cost credit report monitoring, frequent updates to your Experian credit score along with credit score tracking features, and unlimited access to your Experian credit report, this one is definitely for you. There’s no other service which gives you all these things for such a low monthly price.
Similar services to consider
If you want to check and monitor your credit scores from all 3 credit bureaus, instead of just one, Identity Guard Total Protection offers this, as well as an exhaustive list of identity protection features, and 3-bureau credit report monitoring. The main disadvantage to Identity Guard over this service would be less frequent credit score updates (4 times per year versus FreeCreditScore.com’s twice per month).
If you want to specifically check and monitor your FICO credit score, MyFICO Score Watch provides similar credit score tracking features, although it only monitors your Equifax credit report, and its identity protection services aren’t as good. The main advantage of MyFICO is that it gives you your FICO score, which is the one used by most lenders.
