credit karma Archives - Lazy Man and Money

Free Credit Monitoring From Credit Karma

January 10, 2012 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

[Editor’s note: This article was written when there were limited invites to the free credit monitoring from Credit Karma. Recently they’ve enabled all their users to get free credit monitoring.]

There are two ingredients to a great credit score: diligence and luck. The first you can control. The later you can’t. I have to say that I’ve been blessed with good luck in being able to keep the unexpected expenses away as well as not having my identity stolen. Those who haven’t been as lucky as I have might have found that their credit score isn’t where they want it to be.

This can be a problem when it comes time to buy a home. You may find your dream home, have the down payment, but not be able to swing the payments due to a bad credit score. If you find yourself in this situation, or a similar one, credit monitoring may be for you. There’s only one hitch… credit monitoring agencies are typically very expensive. They often hook you into $15 a month deals billed automatically to your credit card. That’s Netflix money now. Still, in the right circumstances it could be worth it.

However, you know what’s better than having to pay $15 a month? Paying $14! Nah, I’m not going to go all 7-minute abs with this. How about free credit monitoring? I can’t give that everyone, just to the first 150 people who take advantage of it.

When I say free, I mean free. You aren’t tricked into signing up for some other thing that you might not want and have to cancel. You don’t even need to give a credit card.

I know what you thinking at this point: “I’m sold, Lazy! Tell me how to get this fantastic deal already.”

The provider of this is Credit Karma, who I have written about before. They are one of the great ways to get a free credit score. For the first 150 readers who follow this link and sign up you get truly free credit monitoring. (If you are not a member of Credit Karma, you should sign up here first.) The monitoring alerts you when there are changes in your credit report. This can not only be used to help you improve your credit score, but it can also help protect you from identity theft.

It’s not often that I’m able to give this away to so many readers. I (well… we) have to thank Credit Karma for making this available.

SF Beta: Financial Innovation at Its Best

January 14, 2011 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

On Tuesday there was a gathering of a number of financial start-ups in San Francisco. There are so many of them that industry’s leading conference, Finovate, has stretched to two days this year instead of the single day it has been in the past. Instead of being a big event like Finovate, this was more of an informal mixer. Lending Club and their main product guru Rob Garcia brought together a bunch of companies to create SF Beta: Financial Innovation.

With such an event in my backyard, how could I not go? Silicon Valley Blogger, her Digerati husband, and I carpooled up to the city to “mix.” I didn’t do much meeting with the attendees. There three main reasons why I didn’t. One, I’m quite shy. Two, I suspect Rob Garcia had some nefarious plan to intimidate me by hiring a bunch of runway models to pose as “attendees.” Three, I was really there to meet with companies and see what they were up to.

What did I learn? Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll go into more detail, but for now I’ll give a quick run-down:

Credit Karma – Credit Karma was there showing off its Vantage Score and its Auto Insurance Score. If you care about your credit (which you should) and haven’t signed up for Credit Karma, get to it!
Credit Sesame – After yesterday’s extensive review of Credit Sesame, I don’t need to go much more into it, except to say that Irene Shubladze is quite possibly the most friendly person in the world… seriously.
Zecco – It’s been awhile since I wrote about Zecco as I haven’t been trading with brokers much these days. Still, I think their ten free trades a month (for accounts with $25,000 or more) is one of the best deals in the industry. They showed off a Zap Trade feature, which is essentially a glorified GreeseMonkey userscript built into a Firefox plugin. For those who don’t speak geek, it edits other pages like CNN Money so that when you see a stock symbol on a story that you are reading, one click opens up a trading window. Zap, you’re investing! (They claim its patent pending, but this kind of stuff is built into products like Skype, and I demoed it for my start-up in 2004, so we’ll see how that goes).

And, of course, Silicon Valley Blogger covered SF Beta as well.

Uncrunch America with Change.org

August 1, 2011 by Lazy Man 8 Comments

While most blogs are probably planning their New Year’s Resolutions, I’m taking action. I just voted to support Uncrunch America campaign in Change.org’s Solving the Credit Crisis From the Bottom Up. That’s quite a mouthful (or is it ten-fingersful since I’m typing?). Allow me to explain a bit.

Obtaining credit is getting more and more difficult in this country. For so long, it was really easy to get credit – too easy. We found that out all too well with the sub-prime mess. In an attempt to right the wrongs, lenders have over-corrected… they are requiring pristine credit scores to lend. “Once bitten, twice shy” isn’t just a Great White song to them. Uncrunch America has a plan to solve that.

Uncrunch America is looking to get people to lend to other people. If you think this sounds like peer-to-peer lending, you are right, Lending Club is one of Uncrunch America’s partners. It’s not just Lending Club though. Supporters also include Credit Karma (of which I should note has a great credit blog that tell me what is a good credit score) and popular online budgeting tool, Geezeo – two companies that I’ve talked with extensively in the past. Throw in On Deck Capital lending to small businesses and a public relations firm and you’ve got an organization with some clout.

However, some clout isn’t always enough. This is where Change.org comes in. This nonpartisan group is simply trying to create a platform where the people can vote on ideas of change. The Top 10 ideas will be presented to Barach Obama on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009. After that Change.org supports an organization (in this it would probably be Uncrunch America) in getting the idea implemented. The details of all this are a little fuzzy to me, but you can read the FAQ here.

So if you think that this idea for helping make credit available should get Barack Obama’s attention, please vote for Solving the Credit Crisis From the Bottom up at Change.org. I would stress that this is the last day for round one (I just heard about the campaign myself), so you may have to put down your champagne for a minute or two. However, it’s close to reaching round two, and if it does votes there will be appreciated as well. Sadly, you do have register for the site, but the sign-up form is 4 input boxes and took me about 45 seconds of my time. I figure it’s the least I can do to give the idea a shot.

Free Credit Scores from Credit Karma – No Scam

November 6, 2011 by Lazy Man 30 Comments

Credit Karma is no scam

If you are looking for free credit scores, look no further. Free credit reports have been around for some time. You can get three reports a year by going to Annual Credit Report. Be very careful not to go to other sites, because they usually trick you into signing up for something that you possibly don’t want. One such example is FreeCreditReport.com, which runs commercials on television. They sign you up for credit monitoring that costs $14.95 if you don’t cancel within a 7-day free trial (I’ll show you later how to get free credit monitoring). The Digerati Life has more information on credit reports.

Credit Reports vs. Credit Scores

When I was first learning about credit, I thought a credit report and a credit score was the same thing. In fact, I never thought twice about either one until I bought a house. I only knew that paying my bills on time would pay dividends down the road. (I was right it did.)

Credit Reports – This is the information on how much and what type of credit you have, your payment history, etc.
Credit Scores – This is a number that attempts to reflect the credit risk by using the information in your credit report.

For those familiar with sports and the processing of drafting a player, there’s an easy parallel. A credit report is analogous all the information your scouts have gathered about the player. This can include how strong he is, how fast he is, his hand-eye coordination, etc. A credit score analogous to what a team does with that information to decide what makes one player better than another come draft day. The Colts and the Patriots might have similar reports on a player, but their scores (how they value the reports) will differ.

Get Your Free Credit Scores with Credit Karma

Most people that have gotten credit scores have gotten a FICO score from the Fair Isaac Corporation. This is simply their interpretation of what’s in your credit report. The credit bureaus have their own credit scores as well including Experian’s PLUS, Equifax’s ScorePower, and TransUnion’s credit score. As far as I can tell, it’s very hard to get access to these scores for free, with no strings attached. The exception is Credit Karma. You sign up and you get your credit store for free (you can see mine below).

There might be a small string attached to Credit Karma. You need to surrender your social security number to them. It’s a necessary piece of information required to get your credit report which is needed to determine your credit score. Some people guard their social security numbers with their lives. In that case, perhaps you are better off paying for your credit scores. I’m feel secure in knowing that Credit Karma is putting a great effort behind security and privacy – their entire business relies on it.

Using Credit Karma

I thought I’d write something long and drawn about using Credit Karma. But it really is simple. You sign up and they give you Dashboard that shows your Credit Karma credit score. You can get an update of your credit score any time you want. However, I really like the Credit Compare page. It gives me a view on how I rank vs. the rest of the United States.

Credit Karma Score Reliability

As you can see from my credit ratings below, I have no issues with Credit Karma’s score. It seems to substantiate the teaser mortgage rate that I qualified for 4 years ago. Since I only have my own credit to test, I can only say that it seems very accurate for myself. If anyone else has experience I’d like to hear your story in the comments.

Leadership at Credit Karma

I had a chance to talk with CEO Kenneth Lin at Finovate, a conference for financial start-ups. Unlike real a journalist, I didn’t take notes. If I had a pressing set of questions, I may have, but I just I didn’t have the time to test out the system then. Plus, as Lazy as I am, I’d rather sit and talk with a guy for a few minutes. Usually by that time I can make my decision as to whether the person is full of bovine excrement. I have to say that Mr. Lin passed the test, not a hint of bovine excrement around.

Final Thoughts on Credit Karma

One of the key questions I ask is, how is this company going to make money? As best I can tell, their model seems to be similar to Mint’s… show you offers from advertisers and collect a commission on them.

Another question I ask is, how does this change the marketplace? I think it has potential to be a huge changer for the big credit bureaus. It reminds of when Zecco came out with free stock trades. In my eyes, E*Trade and Ameritrade have to innovate to show that they bring more value for the dollar. I’m not convinced they’ve done that. In the same way, Credit Karma should force the big credit bureaus to give consumers more value for the dollar spent on a credit score. If they can’t adapt Credit Karma will start slowly eating their lunch. In both cases (Zecco and Credit Karma), consumers stand to win big.