If you are looking for a brief response, it is no. Credit monitoring does not affect you in any way. You can check as many times as you want. Accessing credit information adds only a soft inquiry, which does nothing to your credit score. Maintaining good credit score gets you lower interest rates and other benefits if you have your score in the good or excellent range.
Credit Reporting Agency Experian states,
Nothing changes in personal credit if someone checks their credit report. Accessing one’s own report containing credit information lands in a soft inquiry. Soft inquiries are not considered big by lenders or other institutions. Hard inquiries occur when consumer is willing to apply for a credit or loan. In order for the lender to review your ability to repay debt, they place a hard credit pull request with the credit reporting agencies. Hard inquiries stay on your report for 2 years. Hard inquiries may affect your score.
Who Monitors Credit Score And How Can You Get Yours?
There are three agencies that reports on your credit worthiness in the US. They are Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. CRAs, by law, have to enable customers with one free credit report issue. This happens once per year. You can head over to AnnualCreditReport.com and get your information in the form of a report. You can choose one or all three bureaus’ reports at a time.
Choice is yours. You can opt to just check online report in a digital format or have them snail mail credit information. In case, you view online report, make sure to download and store it in your local system or in cloud.
In addition, pay a monthly subscription fee (if you are willing to spend), and get your credit report in detail every month. It also helps understand why there was a change in score every time. Make sure you weed out bad practices and work on it to improve credit score next time.
How To Get Credit Monitoring For Free?
I don’t personally like spending my hard earned money on a subscription for Credit monitoring. Instead, I use the free monitoring service at Credit Karma for Transunion and Equifax VantageScore 3.0 and track my Experian free through their mobile app. It is not available for everyone. If you are curious to know how, comment below and I will get back to you.
You need to periodically assess your credit report and report to CRAs if you find errors. Additionally, if you fail to report an error and freeze your credit, it can affect your credit worthiness. For example, if you apply for a mortgage in a few years, the lender may deny on the basis of any derogatory marks in your report.
The credit bureaus’ mission is to keep the information accurately, since that’s their main revenue source. CRAs are happy to rectify mistakes if you report them. It could be manual entry misses or typos. Although, it is not an easy process to get mistakes corrected. Be ready to produce a lot of documentation.
As a result, bad credit score attacks you individually as a personal and also as a business owner. If you are a small and medium business owner, you need to keep both your personal and business credit in top shape.
Finally, make sure to keep up credit score by regularly using free credit monitoring services. Keep an eye and report errors quickly. These best practices will land you with loans that are easily accessible and lower rate of interest. As a result, bank will be willing to risk on you thinking you will make payments on time forever.
What Credit Monitoring services do you use? How has it helped you so far? What are the free credit monitoring services you use?
