Credit Keeper Review: What is CreditKeeper and is it worth it?

Credit Keeper is a credit score monitoring company that provides you with information that the three major credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion) keep on file about your history as a borrower.

You receive a daily report that will notify you of the following information:

• Any new accounts that have been opened in your name
• Any derogatory or adverse information that has been added to your credit report
• Any inquiries made by creditors
• A monthly notice in the event that none of the above have occurred

In addition, you will be given a personal credit score and a summary of how your score was calculated based on your history.
If you find errors on your report, Credit Keeper streamlines the correction process by giving you form letters that you can use to dispute the relevant items.

Credit Keeper is an ongoing service that costs $9.99 per month.  This cost is on par with the majority of paid credit monitoring services that are available to consumers.

Here's the important stuff.

Monitoring your credit is incredibly important for all consumers. There is simply too much identity theft in the world for you not to be paying attention and staying on top of your vital personal credit history. With that said, there are cheaper ways of accomplishing this if you don't have a pressing need for daily updates.

AnnualCreditReport.com is the site that gives you free access to your credit report as mandated by the United States federal government. You have access to each of your reports with the three credit bureaus and you're allowed to look once per year. A good strategy to use is looking at one bureau every four months so that you spread out the free access over the full year.

There are also sites like CreditKarma that give you access to a simulated credit score that should help you stay on top of any major swings, though you won't get a full copy of any credit report.

It's also important to understand what a simulated credit score is, because Credit Keeper also provides a simulated score and not the official FICO scores that creditors will be looking at. The difference is that a FICO score is protected as a proprietary algorithm (essentially, the Fair Isaac company claims that their score is their property and their business would suffer if they let people other than the bureaus see how they do their calculating). So companies like Credit Keeper and CreditKarma have created their own formula that they believe closely simulates an official FICO based on the credit information you have on file. This is an important distinction because sometimes creditors offer very different rates to someone based on a few points (though this mostly happens around "threshold" scores that they consider the difference between a tier of borrower - for example, a 619 may be very different than a 621 if they decided to set 620 as the difference between fair and good credit).

Ultimately, credit monitoring services like Credit Keeper are good for people that have a history of identity theft and must maintain a very close eye on their file. Otherwise you'll probably be best using some of the free options that are available.

Do you have more questions about Credit Keeper?  Ask in the comment section below.  Thanks for reading!