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credit-report-free.totalh.com - try this site. I use it to monitor my credit and also cleaned off some bad items from my credit report. You can apply for free initial plan and get your scores and reports for free.

by Mike

4 months ago

Asker's Rating: 

First, are you paying some kind of fee for that quarterly update thru BoA? Paying for monitoring services is a real waste of money. Your credit scores do not really change that much from one month to the next. You can get free annual credit reports from each of the three credit bureaus thru AnnualCreditReport.com. This is the only site that does not require you to sign up for monitoring services. Space out one credit bureau every 4 months and that is more than enough to monitor your credit report for accuracy -- that is the purpose of checking your credit report. The reports are free, the scores are not. You don't really need to check you score more than once a year, if that often. But if you want your credit score, make sure you get FICO scores. That's what creditors use. Any other score is worthless. The Equifax site uses FICO. You can purchase your score for about $8. You can also purchase FICO scores for Equifax and TransUnion at MyFico.com. Consumers can no longer purchase FICO scores for Experian. TransUnion and Experian will sell you Vantage (scale to 990 vs FICO's 850) or each has their own Fakko score which is even more worthless. Third party monitoring services, such as your BoA service, use Fakko scores. CreditKarma.com offers a free score estimator based on your TransUnion report. It's sorta like FICO, give or take 50 points or so. It's good enough if you are just curious to track your score.

by bdancer222- 4 months ago

credit reports update whenever there is activity- in real time. meaning, if you apply for a credit card today, the credit card company will do an "inquiry" into your credit report, and that will show up right away as an inquiry, usually within 48 hrs. If you call to activate your credit card today, the credit report will also reflect that you have a new account, also within 48 hrs. Pretty sure Bank of A is charging you something for this service, so you should definitely check out what that fee it is. and you cannot pull your crediti report every month "for free", because your own inquiry counts as an inquiry and will decrease your credit score. I use CreditMonitoring from Citi and they charge me $11.95 per month to get access to my report & score for free once a month (i THINK these are still the terms), but I dont need to check it every month. They look for any activities that happen on your credit report, and will send you an e-mail (or call you, or send you a letter in snail mail, depending on what you pick) whenever anything happens on your credit report (like inquiries or new accounts, change of name, change of address, etc.). and when i see this e-mail subjected "recent activity on your credit report" i logon to their website and right away get taken to the "activities" page and I can see exactly WHO did the inquiry, for what (i.e. mortgage, credit card), date of inquiry and other junk. Once i verify that this is indeed something I did, i just logoff. simple and worry-free :) They also do an "analysis" and provide personalized tips on how I can improve my score, and what sort of things on my report are seen as "negative" and "positive" to lenders. I am OCD about keeping track of my own credit report because of how prominent ID Theft is these days, so I totally get why you want to.

by Anna- 4 months ago

Credit reports are updated whenever anything that appears on a credit report is reported to the credit bureau. Since each company that reports things to the credit bureaus has its own schedule, updates could occur several times a month. If, by coincidence, different companies report on the same day at different times, then updates would occur more than once that day. Credit scores are recomputed each time that they are requested. They do not "change" at any specific real time. They exist only at the moment that they are generated and then another score exists the next time that the score is requested. Do not use Bank of America. They are dishonest.

by StephenWeinstein- 4 months ago