Ted's Blog

I had ordered my free credit reports before, but I had never actually gotten to see my credit score. I've never worried about it because I figured it was probably pretty good. I know people with bad credit worry a lot about their scores and things they can do to bring up the score a few points in order to qualify for a better loan or whatever.

Yesterday I got a notice from my mortgage company, Countrywide, that there had been a security breach of their customer info. They were advising me to take precautions, monitor for unusual activity, etc. They also said they would give me a credit monitoring service for two years for free. At first I thought it was a scam, but this wasn't just a month trial, it was two years. So I figured I would try it out.

The program is called Triple Advantage Credit Monitoring, offered by consumerinfo.com, a subsidiary of Experian. The "triple" advantage I think is that it monitors all three credit reporting agencies.

Once I finished signing up, it generated a report and showed me all of this information they know about my borrowing (and things they have wrong). But it also gave me a credit score. Experian does theirs on an 830-point scale and I got 805. They said this put me in the 99.7 percentile. That's a pretty good place to be.