myFICO® Falling Down
You may remember that a while back I dumped Experian® Triple Advantage™ in favor of myFICO®. I have to say that so far the experience hasn’t been great.
myFICO® supposedly tracks your credit and alerts you when changes occur. From their site (emphasis is mine):
|
Your Equifax credit file is monitored daily for:
Newly opened accounts Inquiries from applications for new credit Increases in account balances Changes in account status, such as a missed payment New activity on accounts that were inactive Newly listed public records, such as bankruptcies, court judgments, and tax liens Newly listed collection company records Changes to public records and collection company records Changes to the name listed on your credit report New addresses or phone numbers |
As you may know from reading this site I’ve refinance my mortgage and opened a few credit card accounts in the past few months. On top of all of that there were several radical balance changes around surrounding the 0% offers I used. I got my first Score Power™ report on September 20th. In mid November I still hadn’t heard anything so I used up my second Score Power™ Report. My score had dropped 10 points.
No alerts came!
The new accounts show up on the credit report!
The reason for using these services is to monitor credit changes. If you only alert on some credit changes why should I pay so much? Remember, these showed up on the credit report from them, they were not from another credit bureau.
I entered my info into their customer support system which spit back:
Thank you for contacting myFICO Customer Care. In regards to the Score Watch alert question you've submitted, the best thing to do would be to call our support center to work directly with an agent. Kindly call 1-800-319-4433 (Monday-Friday 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM; Saturday 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM Pacific Time), and a myFICO Customer Care representative will be happy to assist you. |
Big help. Why did they make me waste my time? Why not say: “We don’t deal with … requests online”. I tried calling them during their hours but I waited too long. I’m planning on carving out one more chunk of time to talk with them before demanding email support.
Since this request I got two Score Watch™ alerts. One alert was for my mortgage account was added on the same day it was reported. Good. The other alert was that my FICO® score changed without any reason. Better than nothing.
Looking at the two reports from the same account there are at least 4 additional alerts that should have been generated. Two for the account adds and two for the balance changes.
For now I can only conclude that this service does not live up to its marketed promise. I want to give them another chance to respond before saying this outright, although I must say they are making it quite difficult.
I can say that compared to the Experian® product myFICO® does seem to do something.
Before signing up for this product watch for an update to see if the pick up on any other changes and what there customer service says when I finally get them to respond.