You undoubtedly know that there is a credit report on you somewhere. If you apply for a credit card, a personal loan or any other form of credit, the first thing the lender will do is check your credit score, which is based on your credit report. You may know this, too, but what you might not know is that you actually have three credit reports. This is because there are three credit reporting services, Experian®, TransUnion® and Equifax® and each has compiled a credit file on you.
Where the information comes from
These three services all accumulate information from any company that grants any type of credit. This includes credit cards, bank loans, medical bills, auto loans, apartment rentals and any other form of credit you have. This information is consolidated into your credit report. However, most lenders these days won’t read your credit report. These can easily run to 12, 15 pages or more. And there are very few loan officers or credit card administrators who will spend their entire day reading through these reports. Instead, the credit reporting bureaus such as Equifax create a credit score and this is what the creditors will look at when deciding whether or not to grant you credit.
A review of you provided by Equifax.com
Equifax’s main business purpose is to collect information from your creditors and then generate your report and credit score. However, it has created a secondary business, which is an online service called Equifax.com. This is primarily a credit monitoring service in that it monitors all three of your credit reports and your credit score. If it finds key changes to any of your three credit reports, it will immediately send you an alert. When you enroll in this service, you can see your three-bureau credit scores and profiles once a year. You can also access your Equifax credit score any time you wish. This gives you the opportunity to monitor your credit score and see how it changes over time.
Identify theft protection
When you enroll at Equifax.com, you also get $25,000 identity theft protection. If you become victimized by identify theft, you will also have access to an Equifax identity theft specialist. However, the $25,000 protection doesn’t mean that if you lose $5000, you will get it all back. This $25,000 protection is really used only to clean up the problem and not to reimburse you for whatever monies you lost.
Equifax.com calls it service the Equifax Complete™ Advantage Plan and it costs about $17 a month. The bottom line is that the company is said to provide excellent 3-bureau monitoring and ongoing score updates. However, unlike some of its competitors, it does not offer a free trial. If you want Equifax Complete, you will have to pay the $17 up front to get started.