Money doesn't actually talk. We do.

Why Don’t They…Offer Free Credit Monitoring with a New Bank Account?

Here at FiLife, we love credit reports. We love them so much, that we want free credit monitoring.

Well, it would also be nice to have a butler, a private island or a pony. But free credit monitoring seems totally doable.

First of all, your credit report is your life in credit, on paper. It can be ordered once a year, for free, from each of the three credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion). Checking it regularly helps ensure that your record stays clean of identity theft, because as we learned last week, no one is safe. Not only that, but the majority of credit reports have some kind of error, so getting that noise fixed will help you down the road when applying for that yacht loan.

Monitoring your credit report through FairIsaac costs $89.95 a year (that’s roughly 359 dumplings). That seems like a lot of money considering it’s our information. Conceptually, we have a hard time dealing with that one. And according to a recent survey from Synergistics Research, six in every ten people surveyed said that free credit monitoring from their bank would be valuable, while close to a third said it would be very valuable. The survey also found that four in ten people surveyed would be willing to open up a special checking account to receive free credit monitoring; one in six would be very likely to do so. The people want it!

Memo to banks: free checking accounts are common now in the banking world. Free checking is bomb, but it’s not enough any more, especially as fear of having our information breach continues to rise. Here’s a a new chance to lure eager, finance-info-hungry consumers into your banking nests and keep them coming back for more.

And in the meantime, we’ll keep saving up for the other things on our want list.

-Mary Pilon

Illustration credit