How do you know your credit is "good enough?"
Like I said, tons of offers to give me money showing up in the mail every day, always been accepted for anything I've ever applied for. I'd call that "good enough."
Credit card companies send offers to basically everyone all the time, and they extend credit to people with mediocre scores, so I wouldn't use that as a baseline of you want good mortgage rates. It sounds like the real reason you know it's good enough it that you apply for mortgages often enough that you know you are getting good rates and they tell you your score. To me, applying for a mortgage seems like way more work.
If not, how can you protect against so-called "identity theft"
I have a rock that protects against identity theft.
Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock... but seriously, I know multiple people who would have had a much easier time if they checked their credit report regularly and caught identity theft early. Like "what's this new account inquiry about? Or "why does it say I have a GE auto loan??". That's purely anecdotal, but again, it takes only a couple minutes. It's not onerous.
Sure, I'd like that level too. And I have it. Whenever I apply for a mortgage they tell me my score. It's always in the tier where nothing higher would help.
If you have mediocre or poor credit, sure, gaming the system and using tricks to raise it may help you.
See above... it seems you know you have that level because you've applied for a mortgage. Some of us haven't, so wouldn't know where we stand without a site like this. I'm not advocating that
you personally use the site, just saying that there are people for whom it makes sense.
So for someone like that, is there any value in maintaining and tracking accounts at multiple sites to manage your credit score? I haven't heard a reason why one might say yes to that yet.
Probably not for credit. Unless they want to open the maximum number of credit cards with "bonus offers" and still maintain, say, a 700 FICO. Creditsesame can prospectively run those numbers and tell you the impact of opening a new card. So I see value there if you want to play the bonus offer game.
Probably for identity theft. I've personally gotten a data breach notification more times than I can remember. They are very common these days, and often contain enough information to open new accounts in your name. You can get three free credit reports annually from annualcreditreport.com (real government site with a stupid domain) but that's not any less work than creditkarma, creditsesame, etc.
Why use three sites? Well they all use different metrics and pull their data from different credit bureaus. So if (as above) you don't know where you stand, it's better to check more sources and average the numbers. As I said, it's really not much work. But I don't really use the other two anymore, now that I know creditkarma is pretty accurate.
I know I'm sounding argumentative, but I was just trying to understand. I guess I already did. :)
I've already spent more time discussing this topic than I have spent checking my credit report in the past year. So the idea that checking your credit report is "a lot of work" really needs to be put into perspective :-)