Tools for Monitoring Your Credit

You can examine and monitor your credit report and score in a variety of ways.

Under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), you’re entitled to check your credit reports for free from all three credit reporting agencies — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — once a year via the website annualcreditreport.com. You’ll have to enter lots of personal information for verification, but everyone should do this annually. Checking your credit via this website doesn’t result in a hard pull or negatively impact your credit report or credit score. Beyond that, you can pay the individual credit reporting agencies if you want to check your complete official reports more often.

Various other services allow you to monitor your credit for free on an ongoing basis. Two widely used websites are creditkarma.com and creditsesame.com, but note that they don’t monitor all three agencies. For example, Credit Karma only conducts soft pulls on TransUnion and Equifax. That said, the information on one credit report is typically close to the others, and again, this doesn’t impact your credit score. These sites provide a score based on their own models. They’re not your official credit scores, but are usually a good estimate.

In recent years, some banks and credit-card companies have put your FICO credit score on your statement. This information typically does not include any specific details of your credit report aside from the score and, sometimes, minor details about why your credit score is good or bad.

Although your credit report contains lots of information, it doesn’t include information about specific transactions. You would normally see these on your monthly statements, but it’s also a good idea to monitor them closely so if your card number is stolen or compromised, you can notify the company immediately. To make things easier, you can monitor your transactions on the websites mint.com and personalcapital.com. Both sites are free, have free phone apps, and allow you to add all your bank, retirement, and investment accounts. Some other nice features of these sites include bill alerts, bill-payment services, and budgeting.

A couple more tools are tangentially related to credit cards. If budgeting is a central concern, I highly recommend youneedabudget.com. Awardwallet.com is a great resource for keeping track of awards from hotels, airlines, credit cards, various stores, and casino players clubs.

One caveat with using some of these sites is that they often make money by promoting credit cards. As such, they may try to get you to sign up for credit cards that, if you’re well-informed, you shouldn’t sign up for. Generally speaking, never blindly take the advice of some algorithm making a highly specific recommendation based on incomplete information. These sites don’t know the context of your situation or what you want and need from a credit card.

In my next post, I’ll discuss what factors on a credit report improve or damage your score and some simple things you can do to cause your credit score to rise almost immediately.