Monitor Your Credit Score All The Time
The conventional wisdom is that you should check your credit reports at least once a year and your score only when you need it. However, with services like MyFICO and Credit Karma, checking your credit score “all the time” has become just as cheap as checking it infrequently once a year.
Credit Karma is 100% free and they give you a TransUnion credit score using TransUnion data. It’s not technically a FICO score but it’s free and good enough for the reasons I give for monitoring your score all the time. You will have to provide sensitive personal information, since they will be accessing your actual TransUnion credit report, but you’ll never need to pull out your credit card.
MyFICO is run by Fair Isaac Corporation, the creator of the FICO score, and it costs money, about $9 a month. You get an Equifax FICO score every week, among other services. I don’t think it’s important to get an official FICO score all the time if you can get a credit score from one of the three credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, TransUnion).
This is part one of a two part Devil’s Advocate, Angel’s Advocate article in which I argue both sides of an issue. This is the Devil’s Advocate post, here is the Angel’s Advocate post arguing why monitoring your credit score all the time is a bad idea.
(click here to continue reading…)
{ 6 comments }
This Devil’s Advocate post will cover something that’s bound to elicit a lot of discussion – here are four reasons why you shouldn’t donate money to charity. That’s right, you read that correctly, I have four reasons why donating your hard earned money to a charity is a bad idea and chances are there is at least one reason here that you didn’t even consider. If there was ever a Devil’s Advocate post to end all Devil’s Advocate posts (don’t worry, it’s not the last one), this would probably be one of them!
This Devil’s Advocate post is really borderline Devil’s Advocate because it’s not entirely in the spirit of taking a position against something that’s considered prevailing wisdom. You could say that the prevailing wisdom is that failure is bad, success is good; but as the advocate I’m not advocating that you should try to fail. I’m merely saying that failure itself is not a bad thing, much like success itself is not always a good thing; it’s all in context.
This Devil’s Advocate post attacks one of the of the hallmark money saving ideas for the working professional: bring in your own lunch. The money you save by not buying a $5 – $10 lunch every day amounts to over a thousand dollars a year in savings ($5 x 48 weeks x 5 days = $1200). It’s hardly bad advice and practically unassailable from a financial standpoint, but there are many reasons why you shouldn’t bring in your lunch every day and eat it at your desk.
Screw the experts, screw the planners, screw all those smart people who told you that you shouldn’t the time the market. Timing the market is the name of the game! Why wouldn’t you use all of the available information to your advantage? Why buy shares each and every month if the sky is falling? While I respect the thinking that the averages work out over the long run, reality is that no one lives in the long run and you can’t keep throwing good money after bad. If something is a bad investment, the experts say forget the sunk cost and cut loose. So if the stock market is a bad investment, why do they argue that you should keep investing when the smart money says you should take a break?
