Equifax Complete Review: Credit Report Monitoring

Equifax Complete is a very good credit report monitoring service with lots of useful features to help you both manage your credit and protect you from identity theft. Its combination of all three credit reports and scores, three bureau monitoring, and automatic fraud alerts make it a very powerful service, although it would be nice if it had a free trial.

Equifax Complete does a great job of supplying you with a lot of credit information. Upon enrollment, you get immediate access to your credit scores and reports from all three bureaus. While you only get all three scores and reports annually, you get unlimited access to your Equifax score and report. Equifax Complete monitors all three bureaus' credit reports constantly so you will know whenever there is a change on your report at any bureau. We think this is critical both for managing your credit and protecting your identity. The credit scoring formula Equifax uses is their own Equifax Credit Score. While it would be nice if they used the more popular FICO system, we believe the Equifax Credit Score formula is a very good approximation of your FICO score. Plus, it's not possible to obtain your Experian FICO score so Equifax wouldn't be able to provide you all three credit scores if they used FICO scoring.

Equifax's monitoring service is more advanced than others. It allows you to be alerted not just upon significant changes to your report such as a credit inquiry or the opening of a new account, but also on small updates like balance changes for a credit card account. (Note that you can only be alerted on these smaller changes to your Equifax credit report, not your Experian or Transunion report. All major changes to those two other credit reports are still monitored, though.) You can customize these alerts by setting thresholds of when you should be notified, such as at least a 25% balance change or a $200 balance change. While these minor changes may not seem like a big deal, they can affect your credit score and could also alert you that someone else is fraudulently using your credit card. Equifax Complete also includes a useful credit score estimator that will predict how different actions you might take could raise or lower your score. We think these tools are extremely useful in trying to raise your credit score.

On the identity theft protection side, Equifax Complete has some great tools as well. The one we particularly like is the automated setting of fraud alerts on your credit files at all three bureaus. Setting fraud alerts is a solid method to prevent identity theft. Fraud alerts require any lender that is opening up a new account in your name to contact you (usually by phone) in order to verify your identity and that it was you who requested the account. Thus fraud alerts can prevent new account fraud, one of the main types of identity theft, before it happens. In fact, the setting of fraud alerts was the core of the LifeLock identity theft protection service until they were forced to stop using them by a lawsuit from Experian. Apparently since Equifax is one of the credit bureaus, they are allowed to set fraud alerts for you. Equifax Complete also offers more standard identity theft protection features such as $1,000,000 in identity theft insurance and 24/7 access to identity theft resolution specialists.

All in all, Equifax Complete is a solid service with some unique benefits. While at $16.95 per month it's not the cheapest service out there, we think you're getting your money's worth.

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