First and foremost, none of the credit monitoring services give you a genuine FICO score. myFico.com is the only place to get the real deal and the regular price is a whopping $15 per report, per credit reporting agency.
The “FAKO” scores from the various monitoring services are wildly divergent. I’ve been using TrueCredit from TransUnion for a while but have recently sampled CreditSecure from AmEx (Experian) and Chase ID Protection (First Advantage). On credit reports pulled on the same day the average difference in my FAKO score for each CRA was around 70 points. TrueCredit and CreditSecure provide a “Your credit is better than XX% of US consumers” ranking, which are fairly close when averaged but the difference between each for a single CRA was as much as 7 points.
From my credit union I’ve learned that my actual FICO score from Experian is right around the middle of the fake scores — when I talked to a rep about getting better terms and a higher limit on my VISA, she inadvertently blabbed my score, and from the monitoring services I learned where they got it from.
The one thing that all the services I’ve tried seem to agree on is which CRA would provide the best score for me. Historically that has been TransUnion but in the past week they’ve fallen to the bottom and Equifax has risen to the top. TrueCredit puts the difference between best and worst at just 6 points while Chase has it at a whopping 114 points. One of the collections that I paid hasn’t reported to TU or EQU yet so they’re both still due a bump, but I’m hoping for EQU to stay on top since that’s where most of my credit inquiries go.
I’m probably going to use all three services for a few months — large quantities of “soft” pulls can cause “hard” inquiries to fall off of TU and EQU reports — but if I had to recommend one service it would still be TrueCredit, mostly on the basis of having the best presentation.
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