This is another credit monitoring service. FreeCreditScore.com is owned by Experian, one of the three major credit reporting bureaus. As such they offer you a free Experian credit score when you sign up for a 7 day trial of their credit monitoring service. The three main credit reporting bureaus have different names for their credit scores although they all appear to use the software created by Fair Isaac and company. On any given day your FICO score will be different depending on what information the credit bureau calculating your score had in their data base.

I know the information in my credit reports for the three big credit bureaus is different, so I don’t expect my credit score to be identical either. They should be close though unless one of the bureaus has inaccurate information in their data base. That is precisely what you may expect to discover through a credit monitoring service like FreeCreditScore.com. The main features of their service that they call Triple Advantage are:

Credit score alerts

These inform you when your credit score changes. This will alert you when something negative has happened that you weren’t aware of but also give you updates on whether your efforts to improve your credit score are working.

Credit score center

This is an informational tool which lets you learn how credit scores are calculated and what you can do to improve your credit score.

Credit score estimator

This tool allows you to estimate the impact of a financial move before you make it. Use it to see what a car loan will do to your credit score before you purchase one or how expensive of a car you can purchase without negatively impacting your credit score.

Free credit score

You will receive a free credit score when you sign up for a free 7 day trial of their Triple Advantage program.  Be careful here. If you do not cancel within 7 days, you will be billed $14.95 per month for this program.

This last caveat is what you will find in negative customer reviews for most credit reporting companies that offer a free credit score incentive. It appears that many consumers do not read the fine print and don’t discover the fee they have been paying until they read their credit card statement in detail months later. By then, of course, that free credit score has cost them quite a bit of money. Of course, if your credit score changed during that time period due to an attempt at identity theft, you will be thanking your lucky stars that you were informed of this so quickly.

Overall, FreeCreditScore.com seems to be a good company. Star Reviews gives it a score of 5.5 out of 6 possible points. They also commended the company for same day responses to customer e-mails. This is not the case for other companies.

In recent years identity theft has increased dramatically. Even if your individual credit card wasn’t stolen, there have been many cases of thefts from large corporations where thousands of customer credit card numbers were compromised. You are always better off discovering a problem at the beginning of its occurrence than years later when you try to get a home loan and discover that your credit score is terrible because someone else opened false accounts in your name and didn’t pay their bills. The easiest way to discover that kind of problem is through credit monitoring by companies such as FreeCreditScore.com. If you aren’t too worried, you should at least request your free annual credit reports that you are entitled to by law.