<prompt> Human: After the Equifax data breach last year, my husband set up credit monitoring through Experian. Its costing us about 20month. Its not a financial strain, but I find it galling that were having to fork over nearly 250year to a credit reporting bureau bc another credit bureau put our data at risk. If this is what it costs to protect us from identity theft, Ill continue to pay it. I just wondered if anyone on here had found a way to monitor this for free or if this is really even necessary.  <response>: I rely on creditkarma.com - free - tells me about any big changes right way, and then a monthly summary. But I also pay my insurance company 3.72 a month for identity theft coverage - pays up to 1,500,000 to fix any damages done by identity theft. 