Credit Karma FTW!!!!

[pfarber]

While the service is far from perfect (it only has 2 or the 3 major reporting agencies) if you don't check your credit report (and to a lesser extent, FICO score) at least monthly you could end up wonder WTF is up when you need a high score for a good loan/credit card rate.

Today I checked Credit Karma (I hit it once a month at least) and see my score is trending down.

ccerr2.JPG (39.81 KiB) Viewed 5611 times

什么 ???

Then I find this:

ccerror.JPG (29.56 KiB) Viewed 5611 times

I do have a Citi card, but it's been zero balance for months and I even called Citibank to verify my current balance.. its at zero.

So Credit Karma has a big ol 'Dispute and Error' button that takes you directly to the banks web site to report the error.

So I do, and I did. Easy pesy.

The only issue with Credit Karma is that it doesn't have Experian's report. There are two ways to get all three for free. First is annualcreditreport.com but its far from perfect. Experian ALWAYS forces me to fill out a form and mail it in while the other two show me the report online, immediately. The second method is to sign up for Experian's creit report service and cancel in the free trial service. But with how shitty Experian is I don't see them doing this without a ton of work to get the charges/service fee stopped.

But if you don't have a free Credit Karma account get one. You don't get spam (but you can get offers emailed to you) and the loan recommendations are pretty bad... but the free reports are worth the extra effort.

[pfarber]

Evidently the error on my report was cleared and Credit Karma had enough time to scrape/recalculate my scores:

cr1.JPG (41.76 KiB) Viewed 5595 times

+11 points and all's well in FICO land. Suck it Dave Ramsey, well utilized credit is perfectly fine.