Think of it as a "burglar alarm system" for your personal ID: Credit monitoring services have finally come of age, and the need to spend $50 a year to protect yourself from the bad guys is as much a necessity as insurance for your home, auto or health. You wire your home or car with an alarm that'll go off when someone crosses the line...think of a credit monitoring service as a similar protection for your Social Security Number.

What’s it worth to protect yourself from identity theft? Government experts estimate that consumers will spend over $2,000 in real time, phone calls, postage and other brain-damage after they’ve discovered they been hit by the ID thieves–but I think it’s a lot higher, especially when you factor in the reality of losing out on the lowest interest rates available because of the damage inflicted by these scumbags.

You might not realize just who you're protecting yourself from! We're painfully aware of the threat from the bad guys out to steal our identities, but here's another huge area credit monitoring that most people overlook: Spouses and ex-spouses.

Every time your wife or husband opens a new joint credit card account or requests a credit line increase (on an existing/joint account), you're instantly notified! This level of information is invaluable to innocent spouses being rudely jolted into the spending reality that's been going on behind their backs.

If you think your spouse might be less-than-faithful or even planning to divorce you in the near future, credit report activity is always one of the earliest signs that's ignored or not even recognized by soon-to-be-ex-spouses (or their attorneys).

Solution? 24 hours-a-day/365 days a year of credit report monitoring: Sure, it’ll cost you $49.95 a year, but protecting yourself from loss (do you have auto/home/health/life insurance?) ain’t free. Quit your whining and protect yourself from this 21st century pain-in-the-butt..... Click here to sign-up for/try credit monitoring from myFICO.

At the very least, if you sign-up for this monitoring service, you'll get a copy of your TransUnion credit report: Check it out and see what your current credit report looks like and even more importantly, who's looking at you.

The myFICO Identity Theft Security Deluxe subscription includes:

• An Instant Credit Report from TransUnion
• Your FICO Credit Score
• Automatic Monitoring of your FICO score and TransUnion credit report.
• Quarterly TransUnion Credit Reports and FICO Credit Scores
• Weekly Monitoring of 400 private and public data sources tied to your identity, including new names, dates of birth, SSNs, addresses and phone numbers.
• Instant Email Alerts for any suspicious changes to your vital identity data.
• 24/7 Toll-Free Help from experienced identity theft service representatives.
• $25,000 Identity Theft Insurance Policy (NO deductible!) to cover expenses incurred and time spent to recover from identity theft crime!
• Resolution Tools and Tips
• Ability to Cancel your subscription at anytime.

Too late? Already been stung by the bad guys? Get the word out to the law enforcement community and the credit bureaus in a heartbeat.

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