Some people hold the opinion that credit monitoring is optional. They are wrong. Credit monitoring is necessary because we are living in a digital world which provides hundreds and thousands of opportunities to data thieves to steal individual’s data.
By monitoring your own credit, you reduce dependence on the credit card issuers, credit bureaus as well as on retailers.
Benefits of monitoring
There are plenty of benefits of credit monitoring. The monitoring service keeps its eyes on your credit. If there’s a charge on you score or any doubtful activity on your account, the monitoring service tracks it then and there.
You can prevent identity theft. Someone might open a new account using your identity details, or he may gain an unsolicited access to your account. Credit monitoring immediately informs you of such suspicious activities.
Now, the question is how you could monitor your credit? There are several ways. I list down some of them below:
Talk to your bank
Whenever we think of financial institutions, banks pop in mind first. Banks are more reliable than other agencies. The advantage of availing the services offered by a bank, in which you already have an account is you don’t have to share your personal details with another organization.
In case your bank doesn’t offer this service (most do), you can either open a new account at a different bank or ask your bank if it has any partner agency that offers this service. A credit monitoring service, recommended by your bank is more trustworthy than another one that you find yourself.
Sometimes banks don’t offer credit monitoring services, but ample other services, which make up for credit monitoring. Such services include account alerts and notifications upon transactions. Hence, if someone hacks your account and sends money to another account, you’d get a notification from the bank.
Apply limits
This is an effective strategy. You don’t have to hire any service or avail any special offer. You can still get to know everything related to your credit. All you need to do is inform the bank that there is a limit of spending on your account. If the spending amount exceeds the limit, then the bank would inform you.
The advantage of applying limits is even if someone hacks into your account, he couldn’t carry out any transaction without you knowing about it. On the flipside, you might receive a stream of notifications from banks because of spending more than the account limit allows. However, safety always comes at a price, which, in this case, it’s a bit of inconvenience (bearable).
Put all eggs in one basket
Sometimes, it helps you. You have more than one bank account, and to access those accounts, you log in to them separately. What if you could access all your accounts from a unique platform? There are online apps galore that enable you to track your account activities without logging in to each one of them separately.
The tools are quite advanced, and they allow you to filter all the charges on your account by bank account as well as by your credit card. Some charges appear sanguine, but in reality, they are not. The online tools can help you identify such charges. Other than filtering, you can put labels on any account activity, you deem suspicious.
Credit monitoring service
The advantage of signing up for such services is they are free. Besides, the signup process is fairly easy. Such services let you monitor each and every aspect of your credit. There are additional benefits too. For example, the customer gets plenty of useful advice.
Such services have a free version and a premium version. The premium version gives customers access to scores of features including extra credit scores, real time notification, etc. Monthly credit score is one such feature, which charges you, but let you see all your account activities.
Fixing errors on your credit report is necessary if you want to boost your credit score. A credit monitoring service is essential to achieve this goal.
Summing up
The four ways described in this article are very easy to follow. Maybe you are naive person, who doesn’t know much about finance. You can still follow the workarounds stated in this article, and monitor your credit.
So follow these ways and stay alert.
What do you think of the article? Would you follow the ways mentioned in this article? Let us know in the comment section below.
