Review Equifax Credit Monitoring Program

In today's world it can get very tricky trying to keep track of our credit worthiness and this is something we all must do. As complex as it may seem at the time, it is actually one of those activities that will pay for itself in dividends if we take the time to do it. Without the right credit rating, we are going to have a very difficult time getting a home loan, a loan to start a business, car financing, approval to rent an apartment or even, as is increasingly the case, a job we can be proud of. The fact is, the world is getting far more disparate and as a result, people are using credit ratings to try and get a sense of who a person is, what their level of personal responsibility is and how much they can be trusted. Plenty of people will complain about how unjust this is, but the bottom line ends up being that without services like Equifax, we are operating at an extreme disadvantage in the world of financial matters.

Equifax is one of the 3 primary credit bureaus in the United States, the other two being TransUnion and Experian - the one with the catchy commercials about 'free credit reports'. In short, Equifax can be summed up as a consumer credit reporting agency, meaning that the focus of their operation is on consumer information. As a service, they gather, organize and store information which they sell to those who want to know details about an average person for the purpose of doing business with them. The company is much older than you might think, having been founded in 1899, at that time monitoring both American and Canadian consumers by compiling vast troves of data that they could then sell to those responsible for making decisions about the loaning of money. Long before there were modern credit cards as we know them today, your average person still needed credit at their local small town grocer or general store in order to buy the things they needed to survive.

Today, Equifax is one of the world's largest credit reporting agencies and they operate world wide, bringing in over $1.5 billion each year and operating in 14 different countries. They are a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange and have just over 7,000 employees. While they offer a variety of services for consumers, in recent years they have also expanded into the area of commercial credit reporting which means that they now keep watch over businesses, as well. Their line of products is a fairly new feature of their operation since, in the past, they primarily offered their services to other businesses. Now, they have expanded to offer the products they would traditionally sell to a business to members of the general public. Because of this shift in how Equifax does business, you can now purchase a range of unique products from them including: Equifax Credit Watch and Credit Lock.

For those who are looking to keep a close eye on their credit worthiness, one investment that is getting solid reviews across the web is the Equifax Credit Watch Gold product which includes what they call 3 in 1 Monitoring. This is a higher end product from Equifax, but even so it still comes with a price tag of only $15 per month which is comparatively low in cost compared with other similar products. The fact that Equifax as a company has such a broad reach across the credit databases means that consumers are able to get quite an extensive layer of coverage working for them at this price. Equifax is able to keep track of data from Experian and TransUnion so that their customers will be given Instant Fraud Alerts from all 3 credit reporting agencies instead of just one as some other services do. The monitoring is 24 hours a day so that the consumer can get an email alert or even a text message to their cell phone if they prefer.

The nice advantage here is that Equifax prides themselves on making things easy to understand for the average person so not only is data given for all 3 agencies, it is laid out in visual graph form for those who are not credit industry experts themselves. This, in combination with the fact that you can actually set up the alerts to only inform you about certain things you care about or to come at certain times, makes the service really handy for a lot of people judging by reviews. The fact that it is $15 makes it worth it for most people who wanted a really simple way to be able to get the service and have it be something they instantly understood.

While the bad reviews focused on the fact that Equifax, as well as the other major consumer credit reporting agencies, have gotten in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission on a few occasions, this is not exactly uncommon in the financial services industry. Since the FTC is a publicly funded watch dog agency, its job is to protect consumers from even the slightest issues that businesses in any other industry would typically not be hassled about. Since those issues have been resolved, the facts point to Equifax being a trustworthy company since the troubles mentioned were reconciled and the Equifax service has not shrank in the number of people it currently helps, but rather grown.

In the end, all of us have to make up our own mind about which service is best to use for keeping track of our own credit worthiness, but Credit Watch Gold certainly is a comprehensive product that many reviewers have shown to be a stable source of solid monitoring. The depth of coverage, the low monthly fee and the fact that all of the major bureaus are monitored makes it a solid choice for those who want the deluxe option when they go for safeguarding their personal finances. The customization factor for the monitoring service is another strong plus.