Credit Monitoring
If there is one thing I wish I had done before my struggle with identity theft, it would be to setup an account with a good credit monitoring company. The importance of credit monitoring cannot be understated, as as my credit was easily the most difficult thing to restore.
Along with losing money, having bill collectors hammering my phone, and now having to deal with police reports and all of the other hassles of fighting identity theft after it happens, now I had to deal with my suddenly-low credit score. I’ve always been very meticulous about my credit score. I worked too hard to build it up just to watch it slide. My family depends, to a large degree, on maintaining a solid score in case of emergencies. You never know when some disaster will strike and you’ll need to get some credit in a hurry. Without a good credit score, you’re up the creek without a paddle – and that’s where I suddenly found myself.
Imagine the humiliation of believing you have a solid credit score (as I did), trying to buy your wife a car to replace the one she’s been having problems with, and being declined for the loan. The humiliations just piled up, and meanwhile my interest rates on my existing cards were skyrocketing. I even have a job that considers personal credit scores to be of significance, and it took a lot of convincing to get them to allow me to keep my job. I kept thinking, “How could this possibly happen to me?” It happened because I didn’t believe I could ever be a victim. Maybe I thought I was too smart to be outsmarted by a crook. Whatever the reason, I didn’t feel the need for a third party credit monitoring company to be my watchdog.
It took a disaster to wake me up, and I’m hoping I can help others avoid that same disaster from ever striking in the first place.
Once I was on my way to improving my credit once again, I decided it was time to sign up with a credit monitoring service so that I could keep a much better eye on it. I did some research on the various companies offering these kinds of services, and I compared what they had to offer.
The one that worked for me was TrustedID. They gave me an initial free credit score from all three bureaus to get me started – and this cost me nothing. But of course, I wanted credit monitoring, so I signed up for that. They monitor my credit score daily, and if anything ever changes, I get an instant alert to let me know about it. Had I been using this service from the beginning, my credit score would never have fallen so far, and I would have caught the identity thief much, much sooner.
