Never before have Americans been so interested in their credit scores, and as such, numerous sites have cropped up offering to sell them. It can get pretty expensive if you want to keep checking your score with these sites and many people discover hidden monthly fees that rack up quickly. While you can get a free copy of each one of your free reports each year, your score is rarely free.
Enter CreditKarma.com, which plans to change all of that. This is a completely free service that allows you to check the status of all three of your credit scores daily. The site is sponsored by a group of people that wanted to open up access to credit scores and make them available for everyone. If you’re trying to apply for a mortgage or improve your score, a site like this is incredibly beneficial. In addition, they have a kick ass pro-consumer credit blog with great posts like What is a Good Credit Score.
You will need to supply some personal information when you set up your account, such as your address and your SSN. Although the site does need this to check your scores the first time, they do not keep it on file after that. The data is completely secure and we have not found that we received any extra spam after setting up an account with the service.
Once you have your account set up, your scores come in every day automatically. There may be some difference from your credit report from CreditKarma and your regular credit bureau score, but the company claims that this is natural and due to the fact that instead of updating periodically like the bureaus do, they update the score every day.
In addition to all of these features, the site offers special deals that are matched to your preferences. While they do not share your credit score with any of these third parties, they are matched up for you by CreditKarma. The deals range from free trials to credit card offers and you’ll have an opportunity to rank the quality of the deals as a member of the CreditKarma community.
We really liked this feature and thought it added something special to the site as a whole. For those that are trying to improve their credit, one of the best ways is to find a credit card willing to offer you credit and then keep making those monthly payments. By getting a matched up offer, you’ll have a better chance of knowing which card companies to approach and this will cut down on the amount of inquiries that you have on your report.
Overall, if you’re trying to find a cheap way to monitor your credit rating, this is the only site that offers this service for free. We highly recommend their services, but it can get a little addicting logging in each day to see how you’re doing. For those that are trying to improve their scores, this is a great incentive to see how well you’re doing and what your efforts are amounting to. Since it’s free, you really have nothing to lose by giving it a spin.
Here is some of the basic reporting you can expect...
Originally posted 2008-11-26 20:28:37. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
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2 comments ↓
thanks for the heads up~
Pretty interesting site — so far, I’ve used up my free offer to http://www.match.com
So far this appears to be a “calculated” score based on who knows what, but an actual FICO is on a scale of 300-850, not the 300-900 which credit karma is displaying.
The equation which they use for credit monitoring and scoring is a mystery.
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