FreeCreditScore.com Review: Credit Report Monitoring

A subsidiary of Experian, FreeCreditScore.com is marketed heavily online as well as offline with both television and radio ads (it's the successor to Experian's FreeCreditReport.com). When you sign up for their free 7-day trial, you get a free Experian credit score. After the trial ends, FreeCreditScore.com gives you 2 Experian scores per month. The service monitors only your Experian credit report. We recommend monitoring your credit report at all three bureaus as often lenders only report to a single bureau. Thus, we don't highly recommend this service for most people.

FreeCreditScore.com constantly monitors your Experian credit report and you will receive an e-mail alert whenever there is a change or inquiry to your credit. Should you discover an identity theft problem, Experian has a nice added feature in that they assign a fraud resolution specialist to your account to help you fix the problem. They also provide more identity theft insurance than some other monitoring services ($50k), although in general we don't think this type of insurance is really that valuable.

In addition to updating your Experian credit score twice per month, FreeCreditScore.com gives you access to their Score Center, which does a nice job tracking your credit score over time as well as educating you on why it changes and how you can improve it. Their score estimator is a useful tool that tells you how your score would change based on different actions you might take such as paying down a credit balance.

The largest downside to this service is that the credit monitoring and scores are for Experian only. Also, the free credit score uses the Experian scoring system, which is slightly different than the FICO score used by most lenders when making credit decisions, although the two scores are usually very close. Overall, we think most consumers would be better served by going with a service that monitors all three credit bureaus and provides credit scores based on data from all three bureaus as well.

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