ExtraCredit

What Is ExtraCredit?

Extra Credit is a subscription service that costs $24.99 a month and comes with five feature:

• Build It: You can link your bank account to add rent, utility, and phone bill payments to your credit reports from all three credit bureaus.
• Track It: Credit report and score tracking, which includes monthly updated credit reports from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. You can also track 28 FICO Scores based on those reports, including the scores most mortgage lenders use.
• Guard It: The identity monitoring and theft protection comes with $1 million in ID theft insurance, dark web monitoring, and data breach alerts.
• Reward It: A rewards feature that offers cash back onto a reloadable card when you sign up for services or products through Extra Credit.
• Restore It: A discount on CreditRepair.com subscription, or free credit restoration services if you have clean credit but there’s a new negative mark in the future.

You can find these types of services elsewhere, and some other companies might combine two or three similar features into a single platform. However, even searching for the cheapest options, you’d be hard pressed to find a competitor that offers even three of the five for $25 or less a month.

For example, you can easily get free credit report monitoring and score tracking from a variety of banks, credit card issuers, and online platforms. However, most only offer credit monitoring of your credit reports from one or two bureaus, not all three. And, they tend to come with either a VantageScore 3.0 or a FICO Score 8—not 28 different FICO Scores.

A Closer Look at the Five Features

Understanding each of the features, how you can benefit, and the alternatives that are available can help you decide if signing up for ExtraCredit makes sense.

Build It

If you want to build credit, having positive accounts in all three of your credit reports from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion is important. However, creditors don’t have to report your accounts to the credit bureaus, and compiling and reporting the information costs them money.

It’s worth it for many credit card companies and lenders as customers are more likely to pay on time if they know late payments will hurt their credit. But traditionally, only credit card companies and certain types of lenders report to the credit bureaus. And smaller creditors might only report to one or two bureaus.

In the last few years, several programs have launched that allow you to add alternative data to your credit reports, such as rent, utility payments, cell phone bills, and streaming service subscriptions.

With Build It, you enter your rental address, the date that rent is due, the amount, and then link your bank account and the program reports your rent payments to all three bureaus. Once connected, you can also have your utility and phone payments reported.

Experian Boost, a free service, offers something similar. However, it doesn’t add rent payments and the accounts only get added to your Experian credit report. You could use other programs to add your rent payments, but many only report to one or two bureaus and there could be sign-up plus monthly fee (sometimes landlords cover part or all of the cost).

Track It

ExtraCredit’s Track It features stands out from other credit monitoring services because it monitors your reports from all three bureaus and includes 28 FICO Scores based on those reports. These may include the base version, along with auto and bankcard specific FICO Scores. Also, importantly, the FICO Scores that mortgage lenders generally use.

If you’re only looking for credit report and score monitoring, you’re likely better off going with free services. For example, you could sign up for Credit Karma to monitor your TransUnion and Equifax reports for free, and get free Experian credit report monitoring directly from Experian.

Some of the free services will even update your reports weekly, while ExtraCredit only updates monthly. However, in either case, you’ll get notified of important changes in your credit reports right away.

The free options tend to only come with a single FICO Score or a VantageScore, and you’ll almost certainly need to pay if you want your mortgage scores. If you are planning on buying a home and want your mortgage scores, other services that include them often charge around $20 to $40 a month and come with identity theft protections. But they don’t include extra features like alternative data reporting and rewards.

Guard It

The Guard It feature is ExtraCredit’s suite of identity theft monitoring, protection, and insurance services. Guard It includes dark web monitoring, alerts if your information is found in a data breach, and a $1 million identity theft insurance policy. You can also get assistance from a US-based restoration team if you’re the victim of identity theft.

If you’ve shopped for identity theft protection services before, you’ll recognize that many companies offer similar types of protection. In fact, the same US-based teams and insurance companies may be the backbone of many identity theft protection services.

As with credit monitoring, if you're solely interested in this feature, you may be able to find free or low-cost alternatives. For example, Credit Karma comes with free data breach monitoring, and Credit Sesame gives you a $50,000-limit identity theft insurance policy for free. Our top pick for identity theft protection, Identity Guard, also offers similar protections (including $1 million in insurance) starting at $7.50 a month if you pay for a year in advance.

Reward It

Reward It is unique to ExtraCredit and presents an exciting opportunity to make money while building your credit and improving your finances. You have to enroll separately to confirm your address and will then be sent a reloadable card that starts with $5 on it.

Similar to other online comparison shopping tools, ExtraCredit has a marketplace where it will match you to loans, credit cards, and financial products it thinks you might like or be able to use. However, unlike other marketplace sites, ExtraCredit will offer you a reward for signing up and taking certain actions.

For example, you may be able to get paid to open a new credit card, and earn additional rewards by signing up for autopay and making a payment on time. New offers are being added to the program, and it presents an intriguing opportunity to make money for something you might want to do anyway.

Restore It

The Restore It feature can be helpful if you want to repair your credit, or are worried about hurting your credit in the future.

It offers either a $24.99 discount on a CreditRepair.com subscription, which brings the price down to $74.96 a month. The same parent company owns Credit.com, ExtraCredit, and CreditRepair.com, and the CreditRepair.com service is one of our top reviewed credit repair companies.
But you can also benefit even if you don’t need credit repair right now. If you didn’t have any negative marks in your credit when you subscribed, ExtraCredit can help you dispute new, inaccurate negative items that are added to your credit report for free.