Comments on: Free Credit Scores from Credit Karma

By: sheed

sheed — Sun, 10 May 2009 04:43:23 +0000

hey so did you every find out,if we use credit karma does it effect our score a lot or not? And by just logging on to the website and looking at our score? how is determined?

By: Rich Credit Debt Loan

Rich Credit Debt Loan — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:31:14 +0000

great writeup… I have bene using for more than 6 months… they have a very good credit blog too: http://blog.creditkarma.com

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:37:26 +0000

It's also good to know about the 10% off Lending Club fee offer through Credit Karma if you are looking for a LC loan.

By: possibleraise

possibleraise — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:29:23 +0000

I used creditkarma for seeing the fluctuations of the past couple of weeks …
1) credit check for my electricity *ding
2) credit check for cable *ding

moving to a new place can be harmful to your credit : )… on a positive note wirefly wants to give me a free blackjack2

By: Lazy Man

Lazy Man — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:49:24 +0000

Since other grading systems go as high as 990, I don’t see the 890 as being an unusual thing. I don’t think that Credit Karma needs a “fix” so much as a translation into other scales – if the other scales make their distribution curves publicly available.

(Interesting note, my high school did have a 5 GPA scale. So I did have to explain to people that scale was different.)

By: CKFounder

CKFounder — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:53:49 +0000

@Kevin, We will have a fix for this in the coming weeks. Stay tuned :)

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:47:46 +0000

I guess the downside is, this “score” is not really worth anything in the real world since everyone important (lenders, etc) uses the FICO score. Just try telling people you have a 890 credit score and they’ll look at you funny (since the highest possible FICO is 850). It’s like telling people you have a 5.0 GPA on a 4 point scale.

By: Brad

Brad — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:29:16 +0000

If you have an existing account with a lender, they can pull credit on you in a “keeping track of you” sense without it being a hard inquiry. Banks do this often, you’ll often see soft inquiries on your file from the place that you bank with.

Thanks for the tip on Credit Karma, I’m a fan!

By: Mrs. Micah

Mrs. Micah — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:58:40 +0000

I used Credit Karma as part of my initial verification that, hey, I have a credit history. I’d signed up along the way and was thrilled to log in one day and see that I actually had a score!!! :)

By: Lazy Man

Lazy Man — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:59:01 +0000

I don’t have the information that credit.com asks for unless I use annualcreditreport.com to get my credit report and then put it in there. I’m a little Lazy for the two step process ;-).

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:52:59 +0000

Has anyone tried a similar service offered at credit.com?

By: Lucky

Lucky — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:38:52 +0000

Great find. I looked into it and they make their money by offering you deals from their partnering advertisers based on your credit score. Pretty clever.

By: KingTut57

KingTut57 — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:03:29 +0000

Kate,
You must be careful with a lender pulling your credit. Every time they look at your credit it will count as an inquiry. The more you have the lower your score goes.

I did check on CreditKarma as far as if their looking at our credit counts as an inquiry and it does NOT count as an inquiry. Just thought you should know.

By: CKFounder

CKFounder — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:58:18 +0000

Thanks for the post Lazyman. Good, interesting discussion on your site.

As for the score, we are still in beta and are evaluating what is the most useful for consumers.

@Kate, Most lender’s don’t have consumer codes. That is, when they do a score request, they do it as a lender and not as consumer. The difference is the lender codes will be an inquiry for credit and a hard pull. The result is a slight decrease in your credit score. Consumer based pulls like Credit Karma are soft pulls and don’t affect your score. I’m not trying to be alarmist and I’m not sure how your friend is set up but I wanted to point out the subtle distinction.

Overall, I really like these types of discussions since it helps us focus on what consumer want in a service like ours. Thanks again.

By: Kate@Living the Frugal Life

Kate@Living the Frugal Life — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:39:34 +0000

Funny, I just got my credit scores for free yesterday. I was calling up our mortgage lender to ask about an interest rate reduction. While I was on the phone with the loan officer, he pulled my credit scores and told me what they were. So it didn’t cost me anything, and I didn’t need to enter my personal identifying information on any website. Certainly it’s not be an option for everyone, and even for those it’s available to, it might not be a good way to monitor one’s credit score on a monthly basis. But I just thought I’d toss that out there.

-Kate

By: Lazy Man

Lazy Man — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:08:00 +0000

KingTut,

Good call on the numbering system. Perhaps it’s a compromise between VantageScore (goes to 990) and FICO (goes to 850).

I should have mentioned it, but I believe that I asked Mr. Kin that question. I believe he said that Credit Karma uses a soft pull, so it doesn’t hurt your score. You may want to double check this as I couldn’t find the information the FAQ (which was oddly hidden at the bottom of the site).

“We subsidize our cost of pulling the credit scores by selling advertising on the site.”

Good call about the SSN being used to identify people. It makes sense as I wouldn’t want some average Joe just to get my credit score for free with just my name and address.

By: The Digerati Life

The Digerati Life — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:08:52 +0000

Funny! I just wrote about this subject yesterday… :) Someone from CreditKarma wrote me as well and pointed me out to this site. It’s an interesting concept alright!

By: KingTut57

KingTut57 — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:48:47 +0000

One other note. Social Security Number is not necessary to pull someone’s credit. Credit can be pulled simply by a name and address. If they match the buyer, than the social does not need to be entered. The SSN is simply used to verify who the customer is. You would be surprised but many people don’t remember their socials. They come in to buy a vehicle and give their info. We can pull their credit report/score without it but no bank would lend to them without verifying the SSN. Just thought you should know. Karma is just verifying identities of its users.

By: KingTut57

KingTut57 — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:37:33 +0000

LazyMan,
Good find. I deal with credit and credit scores on a daily basis as I am a finance manager at a new car dealership. I went right to that site to try it. You scored a fair amount better than I did. I was a mere 819. Not bad for 25 years old though.

Where this site offers a ton of great information there are a couple of walls it will have to climb first.

Number one is that it is not consistent with any of the other three bureaus. Highest possible score on any of the three (Equifax, Experian, Transunion) is 850. My score on Karma is about 75 points higher than both my median auto-enhanced FICO scores and my standard FICO scores. So, the accuracy of the scores as of right now is unsubstantiated as your score is non-existent on any other bureau and mine is 75 points higher than any other bureaus. Also, on their comparison chart it shows a low score of 150 which is 200 points lower than any possible score on the major three bureaus. I do like the bigger spread (150-950) but if they are going to do that why don’t they stretch it even more and make perfect a 1000 and worse a 000?

The main three bureaus, as you may have noticed from my last paragraph have different scores for different situations. When I pull a credit report the score will be different than if a mortgage lender were pulling credit.

One question I have, and I’m sure I’d find it by looking deeper but will checking my credit on Karma count as an inquiry on my credit reports? If so, this could be a damaging aspect to the site as inquiries can have a very damaging affect on a credit score.

I do like that it does compare my own score with the rest of the country.

I will say in dealing with lenders on a daily basis that score is becoming less of a factor on loaning than content of a report is. It used to be if you had a high enough score you could get a loan for anything. One bank would loan our customers for any payment if they had a high enough score even if they made less income than the payment amount. We can see why this could be a problem. Lenders are really starting to look at the overall package of an application. Not just score but debt to income, available credit ratios, payment to income, similar sized loan pay history, multiple years on the bureaus, and even things like job time, residence time and so forth. I personally think that people put a little too much value in their score. I’m not saying a good score doesn’t matter, but nowadays there are bigger driving factors.

Good find though as you are right, you shouldn’t have to pay for your own information.
I know Karma has to pay for it. I’m sure it’s pennies on the dollar of what we pay, but hopefully they are taking advantage of kickbacks from advertisers as you mentioned was probably the case.

P.S. I’m done with the MonaVie conversation as it would be a never ending discussion (unless MV was taken down or was proven to be a miracle juice).