There are three major credit reporting agencies: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. Before we take a look at this, it’s important to understand what VantageScore is and what it’s not. So next up in the Complete ID navigation was our VantageScore Update. Each one prioritizes different factors, and measures things in different ways. Pro Tip: Don’t worry If your scores vary bureau to bureau. Is three-bureau credit monitoring a silver bullet? No, but we think it’s in your best interest to keep an eye on things. Or that you don’t need a security camera at all, because if someone’s breaking in it’s already too late. While this is a bit of an oversimplification, that’s like saying you only need a security camera on your front door - the garage and back door are probably fine. Some services will try and convince you that single-bureau monitoring is sufficient, or that credit monitoring as a whole isn’t a worthwhile endeavor because once you receive an alert, the damage has been done. Also worth pointing out, Complete ID is monitoring all three credit bureaus here, so if there’s a discrepancy it’s sure to pop up.Ī quick note on three-bureau credit monitoring, though. That’s a lot to go through, but we appreciate how thorough the service is. While we can’t show you everything, we were able to navigate through detailed reports that included: In this section, we were really impressed with the detail of the monitoring. Just note that a lot of this service is a mirror, so if you’re not a Costco member but you’re interested in these functions, it’s available under a different name. We have a feeling we’re going to be repeating that a lot if we keep pointing it out, so we’re going to leave it at that. Here again, we had a feeling that we’d been here before - this section was identical to IDnotify. Home is the Dashboard, so we moved on to the Credit Center. Make sure to avoid the common pitfalls of weak password creation like repeated or sequential numbers, common words and phrases, or using numbers that correlate to personal information like birthdays and anniversaries. But even with these criteria, it’s still possible to create a password that could be guessed or hacked by an identity thief. Costco has some pretty strong requirements - passwords need to be between 8 and 64 characters, contain uppercase and lowercase letters, and include at least one number and special character. Then, we had to create an account using our email address, entering a password, and selecting and answering a security question.Ī quick note on passwords. Here we found nothing particularly noteworthy - we were asked to enter basic information like our name, our address, and our social security number. After entering it, you move on to setting up your account. So let’s just go ahead and assume that you already have a Costco membership number. But if you’re a Costco regular, this is one of the cheaper ID theft protection services we’ve seen. If you’re never going to use your Costco membership for anything but access to Complete ID, you might consider other feature-packed options in that price range, like ID WatchDog or ID Shield. So after getting out the old calculator (what? We’re writers, not math people) we found the real cost of a membership is closer to $18 per month. It’s worth pointing out a basic Costco membership is $60 annually. And if you want a more detailed description, have a look at our Complete ID pricing breakdown here. Either way - it’s pretty reasonable considering what you get. Instead, they offer one complete suite of robust services, and the pricing for it changes based on your level of Costco membership.įor Executive Members, Complete ID costs $8.99 per month for Gold Star and Business + members, it’s $13.99 per month. Complete ID doesn’t offer tiers of protection like most services. Here’s something a little different, though. Now that we had a basic understanding of the services, it was time to select our protections.
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