2. Credit Monitoring + Identity Theft Protect

Welcome to Module 2. This is Kenney Conwell, and I’m going to be covering Credit Monitoring and Identity theft protection. So in our previous module, we showed you, I showed you how to pull your credit reports, which are really good for you to have. It’s just going to show you a moment in time, but moving forward as we go through this process, we need to have credit monitoring and more importantly, have identity theft coverage as well. So I’m going to cover your options. So here’s what we are going to get into on this particular module. So, number one, I’m going to go cover the free credit monitoring options that you have available to you with TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian. I’m also going to get into some recommendations or what I recommend for credit monitoring plus your three bureau reports. So 3B means three-bureau report, plus your score.

It’s a paid version, but it’s going to keep this process extremely, extremely simple as you go through and give you some additional bells and whistles that are going to help you enhance your credit process. The other thing is identity theft protection. This is important. This is something that most people forget. So you want to have identity theft coverage just in case something happens. I’d rather you have it and not need it than need it and not have it. I’m going to cover the simplified credit content and why you want to be able to pull that in a simple, easy format. You would notice at this point, when you pulled your other three credit reports, you’re going to have to go through all three credit reports and that’s is going to be, it’s going to be very, very hard and time-consuming. So we want yo be able to view our content on one page or one monitoring solution.

So that way we can enhance and increase, we can just be more efficient, more effective, right? Then I’m gonna cover some FICO score options as well for credit monitoring. Now this is later on down the road and I’m just gonna cover it just so you know what you should be trending towards and what you should be tracking too. So the very first one I want to go over is Credit Karma. So Credit Karma you may already have a Credit Karma account. It’s really powerful. It’s a free version. That’s one of the pros. It is simple to use. It has an app. It provides you score updates every 7 days. So that’s why I was saying before from of the modules, don’t be an emotional score watcher. Stop looking at Credit Karma because your score is going to fluctuate every 7 days. So that it’s a con, it’s a pro could be a con, but it does give you that update for your scores every 7 days and what’s going on in there. It also has really, really good insight for payment history and your utilization.

So this tool is going to give you a really good snapshot of how utilization is. Because that’s a really, really key factor of 165 points, and we need to know where we stand. The con: it only shows TransUnion and Equifax. So it’s not going to be able to provide your Experian report. It’s not going to provide you your account numbers either. It’s going to show you the account, but it does not provide the account numbers. We already know we don’t dispute online. So I don’t have to get into that.

Sometimes, or typically, I’ve seen Credit Karma makes premature credit recommendations that says, Hey, look, we’ve matched you what with this account and that may not be what you need to do at that point and I’ve seen people apply for their Credit Karma recommendations. Then they get declined and now they wasted an inquiry. So you can be leery of those recommendations that it may suggest because it is a free site. So they gotta be able to be paid somewhere and they get paid from those recommendations. So sometimes it can be premature and it does not provide identity theft coverage. The free version of Credit Karma is not gonna provide you that, but it’s still a simple, easy to use free credit monitoring tool. I’m not by any means saying not to use it. You definitely want to use it. However you want to understand it’s limitations as you’re going through this challenging process. It’s a helpful tool to have for sure.

Then we have Experian.com. So we have the Experian.com free version. So some of the pros here: it’s going to provide you your free Experian credit report, which is powerful. It’s going to give you the ability to refresh that credit report every 30 days, it’s free version. It also is going to give you Experian credit monitoring alerts and updates. So as things happen on your Experian report, specifically Experian will email you and notify you of those updates, which is a really good thing. If you do sign up with Experian.com and you do the Experian boost, which is a separate program they have, which is something that I suggest you do, it’s going to come with a free FICO score if you do it with that specifically. Experian boost in layman’s terms is a simple way to show that your utilities are being paid on time and get credit reporting for that, which is another powerful thing.

So most people don’t have the ability to report their utilities. Experian boost came up with this and they give you the ability to do with your Experian report specifically. So take advantage of it. Some of the cons with the free version is not going to provide you your score if you don’t do the Experian boost. It only provides Experian credit report. Obviously. Sometimes it will prematurely make credit recommendations like Credit Karma does. And it’s not going to provide you identity theft coverage with the free version. Again, this is another tool to have in your tool belt. I’m not saying we’re talking bad about it or anything like that. I’m just saying, look, this is a free tool that you can use for your monitoring for Experian.com. So these two will give you all your scores. What I suggest though is SmartCredit.

SmartCredit is a recommendation as you’re going through this process, because number one, here’s a pro you’re going to have you have three bureau reports and scores. Given to you every 30 days and is great for challenging because it’s going to give you the ability to look at all of your content in one centralized place versus having to look at three different credit reports, two different websites. So right out the gate, this is going to be really great for challenging and doing the disputes. You’ll see. The next thing is it has smart credit report refresh, unlimited. So this is going to give you that the ability with this report to refresh your credit report every single day, if you want to. So you can see where you stand. They also have a tool called ScoreTracker, Builder, and Master. So these are different modules, to kind of see how your score is doing and what you can be doing on your end to make it more enhanced, which is really, really powerful.

It has a free money manager tool, and really what this means is that you can sync your accounts to it and see exactly all your transactions, how you’re trending, because again, cashflow control is another powerful thing about making sure you maintain great credit. It does give you credit monitoring alerts and it comes with one million dollars in identity theft, fraud insurance for not just yourself, but your entire family. All you have to do is just going to push a button and you’ll be able to activate that. So powerful, powerful stuff. Con: it’s a paid service is $22.95/month and there’s no trial and it’s only going to provide you your Vantage score, but it’s still a really, really powerful solution. If I have the ability to let me see if I can pull it up really quickly. So give me a second. Where we at SmartCredit?

I’ve been logged out. So I don’t want to log in, but basically SmartCredit is a really, really powerful solution to use. All right. So let’s go ahead and keep on moving forward. And let’s talk about the other solution here, which is the Identity IQ. Now you may already have Identity IQ already because we suggested it when you signed up one of our previous programs. So again, powerful solution, it’s really, really easy. It’s going to give you three bureau reports and scores every 35 days. It’s going to give you a simplified content view of your report. So this is great as well for challenging. If you don’t already have Identity IQ, I provide the link right below this video. It’s $1 trial and then $19.99/month. We have a $10 discount. That so typically it’s $29, but with this link, it’s $19.99. It does come with $25,000 of identity theft insurance.

So not quite the same amount of coverage, a significant decrease in coverage than what you’ll get with SmartCredit. But if you already have it, you can still use it. You must manually refresh the report every 35 days. It only has alerts with one bureau daily. Not as much value with SmartCredit in my opinion. And it’s only gonna provide you your Vantage score. So Identity IQ is a great solution, just so you can pull your reports. See exactly what’s going on. And if you already have an account with them, then you can kind of keep it there. So it’s a centralized way to view your credit report. That’s the moral of the story. So give me one second here. And what I’m going to do is pull something up for you. I have two screens pulled up here and what I want to do is show you something really, really powerful.

All right. So here it is. So I want to go in and just show you guys since I was going to show you, I’ll go ahead and just pull it up and just show you. So this is my SmartCredit. And like I was saying, it has that Scoretracker, Builder and Master, which are really powerful tools. And it also gives you the ability to look at your three, your SmartCredit report. So this is like a daily thing. So the way this works is it’s going to give you your credit score and it’s going to tell you if you know, what things that you have that are negative and what you need to address. I only have one negative and it’s a missed payment with freaking Capital One. Capital One is the worst when it comes to removing late payments and it wasn’t even my fault, but anyways, it’s going to give you your score.

And what I like about it is, it gives you your Vantage score and it tells you where all of your accounts that you have are. And if they’re in good standing, it going to give you the details, really, really powerful stuff. So there’s a dag on Capital One late payment. I’ve been trying to get removed for almost a year now, but anyways, so this is really powerful. The other thing I like about SmartCredit is it has the score tracker and it gives you like your credit score, your auto score, your insurance score, and then your hiring risk index. So really, really powerful thing there. And it gives you this ScoreMaster. So you can see exactly where you are with the utilization perspective. So you can see, Hey, look, where’s my overall utilization. And if I do use my utilization, let’s just say, I use, I have a lot of lines of credit.

So let’s just say I wanted to use this much of my lines of credit, it’s telling me, Hey, look if you’ll use that much line of credit it’s going to drop your score 108 points. So you guys remember when I was breaking down how your points work and how utilization affects your points. This ScoreMaster is really, really good. So powerful, powerful thing. And the other thing I like is, this ScoreBuilder. This one, ScoreBuilder right here. So it kind of tells you like a plan of action on what you need to do, and you have the $1 million in identity theft coverage. So again, SmartCredit is my recommendation. You have the three bureau report as well, and it’s really, really powerful. So again, if you already have Identity IQ, I’m not telling you to cancel or anything like that, but for two bucks more, you see you get a lot more coverage for identity theft and stuff

that’s going to help you with this process. Now either way, whether you use Identity IQ or SmartCredit, the reason why I’m recommending these both specifically Identity IQ, if you already have it, if you don’t have one, you get one SmartCredit is because the credit report content, right? Your credit report content is King. And specifically we want to be able to look at our content with these areas. Number one: total accounts. Number two: our open accounts. We want to see our closed accounts. Delinquent, derogatory, and collections accounts. This is where the most of the work is going to have to happen. And we want to see it in a simple view. Our balances, and then our payments associated with those balances. If we have any public records and any inquiries in the last two years, and let me show you, so this is where you want to be able to view all this stuff.

Simply put, you don’t want to be going to looking at your Experian report. That’s different than how Credit Karma looks. That’s different than how TransUnion looks and going all these different places just to audit your credit report. It’s going to get frustrating, right? You want to be able to view all this stuff in one place. The other thing is you want to be able to see your personal information in one place, in one centralized view. So this is a screenshot that will show you your TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax personal information. So it’s going to show you your name, any other knowns that you known as. Your date of birth and your current residences, or mean current addresses. Previous addresses, employers. So in a previous module, I showed you how to pull your three credit reports so you can go into more detail. So when we start auditing, you can get into the weeds of getting those things removed.

However, we still want to be able to view our scores in one centralized place like this, so we can just look, okay, see my TransUnion, my Equifax, my Experian, and see how they stand up. And then we want to be able to look at our summary tab and see how our summary stands up. So again, these are the items that we’re going to be really focused on derogatory, delinquent, collection. And you want to just be able to say, Hey, look, let me just see how many derogatories that have on Equifax or TransUnion, or I’ve got 7 or got 10, or got whatever. And then as you go down with the report, it will show each one of those accounts and you’ll know, okay, I need to be able to attack these and complete your audit. So this, this, this itself will simplify the process.

So both SmartCredit and Identity IQ have this. This is a screenshot from identity IQ showing you how the summary tab looks. SmartCredit looks the same exact way. The only difference between the SmartCredit view and Identity IQ is that you just get all those additional bells and whistles with SmartCredit plus this report in a centralized view. It will save you a lot of time. It will save you so much time being able to view your stuff on a one centralized view, not to mention, the identity theft coverage. So last thing is, this is extra credit. You do not have to get this. I do not suggest you get it right now, early on this process. This is really for when you get to applying for credit. So you have FICO solutions that are going to give you the ability to view your FICO score as well.

Again, I’m not going to cover using these FICO options when it comes to challenging in this process. I’m just saying, Hey, look, if you want to know where you stand with your FICO score, specifically, Experian.com has an upgrade where you could upgrade and view all your reports with your FICOs. And then also myFico.com has an upgrade as well. But again, it’s not going to give you that centralized view to see those key components. We need to see on our credit report, which is this. In a centralized view. So right now my suggestion is you hold off on the FICO monitoring options until you have done all of the clean your glass steps, and then all of the ice steps. And then now you’re at a place we want to put water in a glass in this program, which is where applying for big ticket items.

You need to know where your FICO score stands at that point. So again, I’m just covering these options. You do not, and I’m not suggesting or recommending that you get these right now because you don’t need to have your, you don’t need to have a SmartCredit and Identity IQ and this at the same time, right? You just don’t need to have them right now. Our goal is to be able to get our content corrected on our credit report and do the challenging, which is what I’m going to cover in the next module. Okay. So, take action. Get SmartCredit.

If you don’t already have SmartCredit, sign up for it. Sign up for your Credit Karma. It’s free. Sign up for Experian.com. It’s free. Sign up for Experian Boost, it’s free. Get this solution here, SmartCredit, because it’s going to help you out, and I will see you in the next video. Take action. Get this stuff knocked out, and I will see you in auditing credit report.