I am not a big fan of purchasing credit scores. I can understand why a lender would pay to get a calculation of your likelihood of defaulting on your loan, but if it’s based on our data, why do we have to pay just to see it? Even if I am declined for a loan, I can only see my report, not the numerical score that supposedly defines my financial life.
There are plenty of “fake” credit scores out there, but there is no way to get your real FICO scores anywhere but myFICO. If you must order your score, use the promotional code CPPSAVINGS to get 20% off all credit report and monitoring services orders. It’s the best coupon I found that worked:
Whenever you do buy a score, I would recommend trying to correlate your score and the current information on your report. Then you can start to learn beyond the generic rules they spit out, and see how changes really affect your score. I’ve applied for 12 credit cards and canceled 5 with almost no affect to my scores – despite all the “rules” – only to have a huge balance on my mom’s credit card (with me as authorized user) show up and drop it by 30 points.
An possibly cheaper alternative is to sign up for a free 30-day trial of ScoreWatch, which includes two free Equifax scores and reports. Just remember to cancel as soon as you decide you don’t need it anymore.
* Experian no longer allows Fair Isaac to sell FICO scores to consumers at all (even though lenders still buy and use them). But they’ll happily charge you money for their own attempt at a credit score.
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What about creditkarma.com? They claim to use TransUnion scores and it’s free.
This is a great website. I highly recommend it before making big purchases. If a lender is going to look at it, you should know what they’re looking at too!
Also a good note, if you use a coupon for their scorewatch program, the savings goes on the monthly fee for a year. so with the code provided, you would save 20% for a year. When the year is up, go find another code and do it all over again. That’s what I do.
Creditkarma is a credit score (a number based on your credit report), but not a FICO score. However, it can be useful in relative terms to track changes to your credit history without actually pulling a report every time.
How about asking your favorite mortgage broker to obtain your report for you? I don’t think any reasonable broker will refuse.
A year ago I paid $18 for an official report from all 3 bureaus. A nice guy/gal may even provide it to you for free!
That is a thought — has anyone found a place offering free monitoring/scores trials with reports and scores that were easy to cancel? From my experience generally with free trials, it is usually a rather painful experience to cancel such things, so I was wondering.
So I’ve been using CreditKarma too..what IS the difference between a FICO Transunion score and a CreditKarma Transunion score? I just don’t get why they’d be different…I mean, I trust your word that they are, but now I’m a bit confused.
@Motti
If a mortgage broker pulls it, it results in a hard pull that can negatively afffect your score because it shows up as an inquiry. If you check it yourself you avoid that penalty.
the difference between Credit Karma and a FICO score is that a FICO score is THE original score that most lenders or crediting agencies will use. Credit Karma is developing their own score to sell to you but NO lenders are looking at it for anything.
I don’t know about you, but I want to know what my lenders are looking at.
A credit score is a secret formula that takes your credit report info, and creates a number that is supposed to estimate your likelihood of paying back a loan. Since each credit bureau has different data, you have 3 different FICO scores for each one.
FICO is the industry standard, which means most lenders pay for the FICO score and make a decision based partly/mostly on it.
Other credit score makers try to guess and emulate the secret formula. Some people find their Credit Karma scores match FICO relatively closely, while others find significant differences.
CreditKarma did not “develop” there own score. They purchase an internal score generated by TransUnion. The score, called “The TransRisk score” is way off from FICO in many cases. Some users report it being within 10-20 points but then you have people like myself and others where the CreditKarma score is over 50 points different than my Transunion FICO. Also, that simulator is off as well. I simulated what would happen if I paid my bills on time for the next 24 months and my score went down!
There is a danger in using a score that really isn’t used by any lenders. It is not using the same “best practice” data points that FICO(the score that’s actually used by lenders) is looking for. i.e. what’s good for the CK score is not matching the FICO score. If you try to learn too much from CK you can have some issues then.
I just have experienced a lot of crazy volatility with this Transrisk score. For example, it does not properly take into account no-preset spending credit/charge cards so your score drops as a result and that credit report card says your maxed out when you really are not. (it was simply the score looking at your high balance as your credit limit instead of looking to see it was an “OPEN” – no pre-set limit card and that it should not be used in utilization) which my FICO score properly deduced.
Then I have had instances where my CK score is higher that friends CK scores who have longer histories, with better characteristics, according to FICO!
Then there was the time I looked at my “Credit Snapshot” and it stated I should pay my bills on time more often, when I never paid my bills late ever!
Granted, Transunion is feeding this information to CreditKarma, my point just is that there is a danger that this product can cause more confusion when it’s not using a stable and commonly used score. It’s a great offering I just don’t trust the score.