{"id":304,"date":"2009-11-13T09:23:47","date_gmt":"2009-11-13T13:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/?p=304"},"modified":"2009-11-13T09:23:47","modified_gmt":"2009-11-13T13:23:47","slug":"check-your-credit-score-for-free-with-creditkarma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/2009\/11\/13\/check-your-credit-score-for-free-with-creditkarma\/","title":{"rendered":"Check Your Credit Score for Free with CreditKarma"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Building and maintaining good credit is a lifelong challenge, and one that can have significant impact on many facets of life, including securing a solid interest rate on a mortgage or car loan, or even getting that dream job with an employer who wants to make sure she&#8217;s hiring a responsible individual. So monitoring your credit report &#8212; ensuring that no one&#8217;s stolen your identity and that the information being reported about you is accurate &#8212; should be an ongoing financial goal. <\/p>\n<p><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/screenshot_new1.gif\" alt=\"CreditKarma\" title=\"CreditKarma\" width=\"266\" height=\"286\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-320\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Sites like the free <a href=\"https:\/\/www.annualcreditreport.com\">AnnualCreditReport.com<\/a> make it easy to check the details of your credit report &#8212; you can request one free report from each of three credit bureaus once per year &#8212; but until now, you&#8217;ve had to pay for your FICO score from sites like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.myfico.com\/\">myFICO<\/a> ($15.95\/report or $8.95\/month to monitor your score). <\/p>\n<p><center><a href=\"https:\/\/www.creditkarma.com\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/snag-2378.png\" alt=\"CreditKarma\" title=\"CreditKarma\" width=\"242\" height=\"51\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-310\" \/><\/a><\/center><\/p>\n<p>We all like free, so enter <a href=\"https:\/\/www.creditkarma.com\/\">CreditKarma<\/a>, a site that gives you your credit score <strong>free of charge<\/strong> &#8212; and it takes a whole two minutes or so to sign up, see your score, and get a letter grade in various categories, including the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Open Credit Card Utilization<\/li>\n<li>Percent of On-Time Payments<\/li>\n<li>Average Age of Open Credit Lines<\/li>\n<li>Total Accounts<\/li>\n<li>Hard Credit Inquiries<\/li>\n<li>Total Debt<\/li>\n<li>Debt to Income Ratio<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here are my actual letter grades in a few of the categories (for the record, even though the first one shows 3% on credit card utilization, my wife and I pay off our credit card balance every month; we use a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.southwest.com\/rapid_rewards\/visa.html\">Southwest Airlines credit card<\/a> for most purchases and bills to earn Rapid Rewards credits, so I&#8217;m guessing that 3% refers to our balance at any given time, even though it&#8217;s never carried over):<\/p>\n<p><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/snag-2379.png\" alt=\"CreditKarma grades\" title=\"CreditKarma grades\" width=\"536\" height=\"422\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-313\" srcset=\"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/snag-2379.png 536w, https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/snag-2379-300x236.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 536px) 100vw, 536px\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>You can also see how you compare with others in your age group, state, and even email domain (e.g., I can see that my credit score puts me in a percentile higher than most in my age group (93.2%), and that Gmail users score among the highest percentile (88.5%), <a href=\"http:\/\/www.creditkarma.com\/trends\/domain\">relative to other email domains<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/snag-2377.png\" alt=\"age percentile credit score\" title=\"age percentile credit score\" width=\"488\" height=\"149\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-309\" srcset=\"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/snag-2377.png 488w, https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/snag-2377-300x91.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 488px) 100vw, 488px\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not your FICO score, the official number used by the credit reporting industry, but it&#8217;s pretty close and a good indication of where you stand. The number and credit reporting data come from TransUnion, one of the three major credit reporting agencies (Experian and Equifax being the other two). <\/p>\n<p><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/11\/freescore.gif\" alt=\"credit score tracking\" title=\"credit score tracking\" width=\"272\" height=\"157\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-308\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a great way to make sure your credit is in good standing, and it&#8217;s always fun to track data over time &#8212; to monitor improvement, to see how you stack up against others, and so on. You can login to CreditKarma as often as you&#8217;d like, though your score won&#8217;t actually update more than once per month. <\/p>\n<p>The CreditKarma business model is similar to that of <a href=\"http:\/\/mint.com\/\">Mint.com<\/a> (<a href=\"http:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/2008\/12\/23\/manage-finances-automatically-with-mintcom\/\">my review<\/a>) in that it offers you a free service and offsets its costs by analyzing data in bulk and tailoring financial offers to you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Building and maintaining good credit is a lifelong challenge, and one that can have significant impact on many facets of life, including securing a solid interest rate on a mortgage or car loan, or even getting that dream job with an employer who wants to make sure she&#8217;s hiring a responsible individual. So monitoring your [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-financial","category-web-apps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":324,"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions\/324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabeanderson.com\/tech-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}