The Advantages and Disadvantages of Credit Karma

I have been using and recommending Credit Karma for years. There are a lot of advantages to using this service to get a good look at your credit. One of the real nice advantage is that Credit Karma is a free service. They have large paid advertisers base that cover the cost of this service. What that means to you is that you will never have to give Credit Karma a credit card number to use this service. Some of the other credit services offer free credit information but you have to supply them with a credit card, some of these services only give you thirty days of free service and then they charge you a fee. With Credit Karma you do not have to worry about ever getting charged for the service they provide.

Here are a few of the services that Credit Karma offers you:

Credit Karma gives you a report card of credit. This is an analysis of your open credit card utilization, average age of open credit lines, hard credit inquiries, total debt, and of course the big debt to income ration.  This report is awesome because it shows you a grade of A through F for each area. If you use this information correctly you can fix these areas that you are scoring a C or worse to help improve your overall credit score.

You also receive for free is a snapshot of your credit score from TransUnion which can be updated as much as you like. Credit Karma keeps track of your score over a period of time and lets you know how you are coming along hopefully fixing any credit issues. The snapshot is a view of how lenders are viewing your credit as compared to the national scores.

A great tool that Credit Karma offers is a credit simulator. This tool gives you fourteen different simulations that you can run to see how they will affect your personal credit. One example I tried was, how raising my credit limits affected my overall score. The fourteen options are broken down into three categories: credit limit, payments, and records.

Other feature that Credit Karma offers are news articles dealing with finances, financial tools, financial calculators and forums and feeds pertaining to finances.

The only disadvantage of Credit Karma is that they don't give you a true "FICO Score". They do offer a real close to true score which is very helpful. This is the only thing I found to be a little disadvantage, but I can live with it since they do offer so many other beneficial tools to help a person with there credit issues.

Check your credit report and credit score regularly.

If you are like most people you probably have never checked or have not checked recently your credit report or at least your credit score. It is highly recommended that you check your credit report on an annual basis. There are many reasons why you should check your credit at lease once a year. Here are a few of the reasons that you should take this opportunity to check your report.

It is Free. Today there are not many things that are truly free with some sort of strings attached. But a yearly credit report from all three credit reporting agencies TransUnion, Equifax and Experian is free. Your credit report plays a large role in your day to day life. AnnualCreditReport.com offers your credit report free of charge.

To Detect Identity Theft. Identity theft is a major problem for all of us today. If you have opened up a bank account or bought a car or house, filled out a application online then your identity has been corrupted one way or another. A lot of people think that they are free from identity theft because they pay for everything in cash or don't own a computer, that is a huge mistake. Identity theft is happening every day, you need to run your credit report annually just to check if your credit has been compromised without you knowing it. Scan over your report and check to see if any accounts that you have no clue what they are has been open in your name. You may be surprised of what you find, I myself have caught a couple huge accounts show up on my credit report, luckily enough I caught them early and was able to fix the issue with the credit reporting agencies before things got out of hand. But if you do not check your report regularly credit fraud can really put a damper on your credit report.

You Were Denied Insurance or a Job. If you have been denied any credit or insurance or even a job you can request a free copy of your credit report, this must be done within sixty days of being denied. The credit report will give you some insight to why you were denied. There could be something on your report that you have no idea what it is, this is a good sign of fraud. Or the report may open your eyes to some foolish spending habits that you may need to change. What ever the issue, if you have been denied then you need to take this opportunity to receive your free report and work on fixing what ever the issue is that caused you to be denied.

Public Records That Are Not Yours. One thing you need to look at closely on your credit report is judgement's, liens, bankruptcies, tax liens, and other civil judgments that do not belong to you. If you have hired any work done in the past for your home you may have a contractor lien on your credit report. The company that I work for, if we have a contract with a customer and they fail to pay us in ninety days we file a lien against their credit. These items you do not want to show up when someone like an employer pulls your credit.

These here are just a few reasons of why you need to pull your credit report annually, we will be looking at other reasons in the near future in order to help you get your finances in order.