WaMu Credit Monitoring

Has anyone here gotten a Washington Mutual credit card in order to have free access to your credit score? They're the only credit card company that I know of that offers this service, and most of the credit monitoring services that I have seen seem pretty expensive for what you get. Also, since I currently have two credit cards that I don't use very often should I close one of them if I get a WAMU card? I know that that'll temporarily lower my credit score, but from what I understand having too many credit cards is also viewed as a negative by creditors.

Go here and type "Providian" in search box.

Ok, thank you very much for the advice.

I also have a WAMU credit card with the so-called "credit monitoring" you are talking about, but it is not a credit monitoring per se, meaning that it only gives you the Transunion FICO and other less useful information, such as number of open accounts, number of closed accounts, number of inquiries, etc. It does not list all of these like in a credit report. And the score gets updated only once a month.

The WAMU card is great *just* for the TU FICO score. There are no annual fees, so get the card and throw it into a file. It's the only way you can pull your true FICO score for free, so IMHO everyone should have this card. Every credit monitoring service except myFICO gives you fake scores, and myFICO charges you $15 per score calculation except for Equifax.

WAMU's Tiered rewards card isn't bad if you use the card a lot, but the rest of their cards are mediocre, so for daily usage I would go for another card, keeping this one just for the monitoring.

Don't close your other cards. The age on the account boosts your credit score. Leave them open and put them into the file with the WAMU card if you aren't going to use them. The only time you ever would need to close them is if someone you want credit from asks you to, and in that case they will give you the opportunity to close them then and there before denying you outright. Closing cards doesn't "temporarily" lower your credit score. It permanently reduces your "average age of accounts" which is the most difficult part of your credit report to establish.