What is Credit Monitoring?
Even though you are entitled to one free credit report every year from each of the three national credit reporting bureaus, you may find that you want more frequent access to your credit history.
With a credit monitoring product, you can check your credit report as often as you like, from at least one of the national credit reporting bureaus — but sometimes all three — and set up alerts that will notify you if the information in your credit file changes.
How Can Credit Monitoring Help Me?
Credit monitoring is a valuable tool you can use to help protect yourself against identity theft and other types of financial fraud. Credit monitoring can help you spot fraudulent accounts that have been opened in your name, as well as unfamiliar loans that may have been taken out using your Social Security number and other personal information.
The sooner you catch activity by an identity thief or fraudster who has hijacked your personal information and used it to take out a loan or open up a credit card in your name, the easier it will be to restore your identity and financial life
Will credit inquire from credit monitoring company affects me?
Before you subscribe to any credit monitoring service you should carefully read the membership agreement information. The agreement should tell you whether or not using it will impact your credit scores through the addition of inquiries on your credit report. Most credit monitoring services that provide unlimited access to your personal credit report do so without any impact on your credit scores.
Every time your credit report is accessed, an inquiry is added. An inquiry is simply a record of that access. There are two types of inquiries. One impacts credit scores, the other does not.
Inquiries resulting from your application for credit are shown to lenders when they request your credit report. Those inquiries represent potential new debt that doesn’t yet appear as an account on your report. Because they are provided to lenders, those inquiries, sometimes called “hard inquiries,” can have a slight impact on credit scores.
Because you are requesting your personal report from Transunion, Experian or Equifax, when you use its credit monitoring services, the inquiries that are added are shown only on your personal report. The soft inquiries do not affect your credit scores. Sometimes called “soft inquiries,” these are not provided to lenders and so do not impact credit scores.
