I mostly agree with everything John said. The question is not whether you CAN do these things yourself, but whether your time is so valuable that you are better off hiring a company like Lifelock to do it for you.

Another option now becoming more available through property casualty insurance companies is an active credit monitoring service. My experience has been they cost around $10-15 per month.

Rather than saying whether or not I believe in their service I'll tell you what they do and where you can do the same things for free. Then you can decide if it's a good service or not.

LL opts you out from preapproved credit offers....

You can do it free here... www.optoutprescreen.com

LL orders your credit reports for you...

You can do it for free here... www.annualcreditreport.com

LL places fraud alerts on your credit reports...

You can do that for free by contacting any one of the three credit bureaus and adding a fraud alert with them directly. They then share that info with the other two.

LL renews your fraud alert every 90 days....

You can do the same for free with the bureaus directly.

LL monitors "criminal" websites for your personal info...

You can do the same using the Google Alerts function...and it's free.

LL tells you if someone has changed your address...

You can do the same thing by contacting the USPS.... for free.

Incidentally, the $1MM insurance policy.....

If LL pays more than $2 per year per member covered I'd be shocked. ID Theft insurance policies are very inexpensive.

Now you can decide for yourself.