It’s Truly Free
It wasn’t too long ago when it was impossible to find out your credit score at no cost unless you paid money or jumped through a lot of hoops. If you didn’t want to pay to see it, you had to give your credit card and sign up for a one-month trial of a credit monitoring service. It was the introduction of Credit Karma and other sites like it where you could find out your credit score at no cost and without having to give a credit card.
More Than a Credit Score
While all these sites started off by offering no-cost credit scores, they have expanded to offer other information as well. Credit Karma and Quizzle both offer free credit reports while Credit Sesame offers free identity theft protection. You get even more financial information than you thought you were going to get.
Credit Education
Credit Karma and sites like it do more than just give you your credit score. In addition, they have a number of tools and information which can help you better understand your credit score, and how the financial decisions you make affect it. By better understanding how the financial decisions you make do affect your credit score, you’re in a position to be in control of it, and to build the score to your advantage.
Frequency
The free credit score sites allow you to view your credit score and credit report on a regular basis, rather than just every once in a while. For those who are in the process of trying to rebuild their credit, this allows them to see the incremental changes that come with the financial decisions that they make, and how these decisions affect their score over time.
Credit Goals
If you’re trying to improve your scores, the site can help you view and maintain your credit goals. Improving your credit score isn’t a one time thing that magically makes it improve. In order to improve the score, you have to make changes in how you handle your finances as compared to what you were doing before. These sites can help you find a credit score goal, and help you work toward that goal until you achieve it.
It’s Easy
For those who are curious where their credit score stands, these sites are an easy way to find out what that score is. You simply need to sign up with the service, and you can find out what your current credit score is right away. Then if you want to see if it has changed at any point in time, you simply need to log back into the site to find out what your current credit score is. It’s a convenient way to find out your current score without having to pay money to do it.
I used to use these services quite a bit a year ago, but I don’t now because I get my credit score with my credit card statement. I may have to go and check out their new credit report feature, but I do get mine for free from annualcreditreport.
People, wake up! It isn’t a credit score, it’s a DEBT SCORE. It tells you how good you are at getting in debt. You want your score to be zero, not try to make it high because all that means is you’re going into more debt. List to Dave Ramsey to learn what’s really important. You should only car about your DEBT SCORE if you plan on being in debt for the rest of your life.
@Faith
You might actually want to learn about credit scores and their importance than just parrot what you read in books.
LOL! Any misinformed person please do not pay attention to @faith, troll or otherwise.
And, as @scott said, Discover/Barclays give you your real FICO (and not “FAKO”) score. Accessing your credit score from each of the 3 bureaus if free on annualcreditreport. What I do is check one of them every 4 months.
In the fine print, creditsesame tells you the cards they may recommend for you have been approved by others with TransUnion scores similar to yours. Likewise, creditkarma cites previous approvals for those with Experian scores like yours. Short of skyrockets, I don’t know how much more obvious they can make which scores they post. Quizzle uses Equifax, so let’s hope their analysts have a good mental health insurance plan. But nobody alive fully understands all the sundry mathematical quirks involved in the hundreds of different scoring models.