Montinoring your credit is good.  It is necessary today on a semi annual basis to make sure you do not fall victim to identity theft.  If you are in the middle of credit rehab, then a daily monitoring service with the ability to pull a fresh consumer report every 24 hours is a must.

The reason why free reports are bad is because when you need to file a dispute with Transunion, Equifax or Experian, they now have 45 days to do their research rather than 30 days.  If you are playing the loophole game in credit rehab, this is very important.  If you have a problem you want clear up, it is reasonable to get it cleared up a quickly as possible.

There are two types of credit report pulls.  One is known as a "Hard Pull" and one a "Soft Pull".

Hard Pull - This is when you apply for credit.  This pull (inquiry) will show on your report and after certain numbers of pulls will start to affect your score.  Typically if you are shopping for a loan for a home or car, multiple hard pulls within a short time frame will not decrease your score.  These pulls will stay on your report for two years before dropping off.

Soft Pull - This is when you as a consumer pull your own report through a thrid party service such as myFICO.com or TrueCredit or order your report directly from Transunion, Equifax or Experian.  You can pull daily through a service like TrueCredit and monitor rehab or changes in real time.  SOFT PULLS have no (ZERO) impact on your score. In fact they can help your score on Transunion and Equifax.  Continual daily soft pulls on TU and EQ will eventually bump off Hard pulls, so if you have too many hard pulls and do not want to wait 2 years for the hard pulls to fall off, you can bump them off early through daily soft pulls.  It takes as many as 100 or more soft pulls, but I have seen it work.

Remember FREE REPORTS are BAD.  If you cannot afford to pony up the whopping total of $30.00 to get the three reports directly from each Credit Reporting Agency, then you should not be applying for new credit.