Monitoring your credit is necessary but time-consuming, the FACTA act made great efforts in ensuring that consumers have access to their credit reports for free once a year from each of the credit bureaus, and yes this is better than none, but it simply is not frequent enough to give consumers plenty of alert to take action against credit fraud and other types of identity theft.

Other financial experts recommend that you check your credit report twice a year, but ideally you should do it once every quarter. Especially if you’re actively using credit and if anyone other than you has access to your social security number, then the bottom line is you really need to be monitoring your credit as often as once each quarter.

Credit reports are updated once a quarter by the credit bureaus but updates can be recorded anytime especially if there’s a lot of  activity, like credit inquiries, new accounts, or negative entries.

Employing credit monitoring services in general means that you have your credit report monitored for you on a regular basis, and you get alerted via email, phone or letter about any changes to your credit history.

Credit Monitoring: The good and the bad

There are those who do not consider these services worthwhile and those who feel it is essential to your overall credit health. Yes you can monitor your own credit with some effort, and depending on how often you plan on doing it, you’ll need to request a copy of your credit report from each of the credit bureaus individually and pay each for the report.

Doing it yourself is less convenient and you get no alerts. For around $10 a month most credit monitoring services will include a number of benefits to include a service warranty and resolution assistance should anything happen. You won’t get any of these benefits by monitoring your own credit files.

If you can do without the additional benefits then for around $10 to $15 dollars you can get each of your reports each quarter and review your accounts. So it really is a matter of do you want to do the foot work yourself?