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Too often you hear the complaint that a credit monitoring service is billing whether the customer wants the service or not. This is a shame, and it is ironic that one of the reasons you want the service is to find and remove erroneous debt items on your report.

One common solution to this is to use a debit card rather than a credit card when you purchase a service. If a service continues to bill after you’ve finished with the service, you can always cancel the debit card.

Canceling a credit card can have a negative impact on your credit file though. Using a debit card saves you this headache.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Oftentimes credit monitoring services are considered an expensive waste of time. Oftentimes you can accomplish just as much towards fixing your credit on your own not spending any money.

On average, a credit monitoring service will cost about $10 per month, per report. It is true sometimes that can monitor your own credit report for less than the average cost of these services.

However, sometimes people like the peace of mind of hiring a professional service and/or online software to do this action for them. Besides, you may want to receive reports from all three agencies at once.

With many monitoring services all three reports are included, but you may be required to request all of them at once. At the very most it could cost you about $36 a month or $432 a year to do this, unless of course you receive discounted prices as mentioned above (approximately $10 per month).

Regardless of what you pay, what you would receive for that $432 per year varies. It depends upon the services that you choose. However, in general you can expect that you’ll be alerted if someone applies for new credit.

You also have the luxury of being told if something suspicious turns up on your credit report. Most monitoring services also come with identity theft insurance that will help you recuperate the costs necessary to repair any errors that occur.

You also have the option to use one of a variety of identity theft services. On the other hand, you can monitor your own credit report even for as low as $8 per report.

You may have to do a little bit more work when you monitor your own report. However, you can save some money.

On the other hand, many people find that the expense of a monitoring service is much easier. They would rather pay this extra fee than monitor their own credit reports.