Your Credit Karma

The ancient concept of Karma basically means what goes around, comes around. The creators of Credit Karma believe that this is especially relative to your credit score. And that is the idea behind the free credit score monitoring service Credit Karma.

The general idea is that any action a person takes either positive or negative, will have an inevitable equal effect in the future. Your credit score is kind of an expression of this concept; an index of your credit history: your credit karma.

What I like about the Credit Karma site is the simulation piece. Recently FICO revealed the formula for how your actions affect your score. Credit Karma includes a simulator that shows you how various actions might change your score, based on FICOs secrets. Now, of course, you could figure this out yourself, but that might require a calculator and use of your brain which takes time. Credit Karma does it in an instant and lets you play around with scenarios.

To use Credit Karma you will have to give some basic personal information, like your social security number.But the company’s privacy policy states that your SSN is not stored and your personal information is not shared. My husband and I been using the service for several months and have not had any problems.

You will be shown “offers” (a.k.a. advertisements) for services such as credit cards, but that’s to be expected on a free site and they are easily ignored. Credit Karma asks you to vote on the offers, which my guess is that they use the voting to further customize the offers.

I’m not plugging this service for any reason other than I want you to know about this quick easy way to monitor your credit score. I haven’t been in touch with the company and am not receiving anything from them. I just think it’s handy. We were thinking about refinancing our mortgage and wanted to check on our scores. Sure we could have ordered a copy of our credit report, but at the moment we just wanted a quick check. Credit Karma gave us the numbers instantly. We did end up checking our credit report as well.