Is the credit score from Credit-Karma a real credit score?
Another credit score offering out there are calculators that estimate your credit score for you. The catch is that they estimate your credit score based upon the information that you provide. Chances are that there is no way you are going to enter all of the information that exists in your credit report, so it is not a very accurate estimate, no matter how good the credit score calculator program itself is.
That didnt happen with CreditKarma.com either. Instead of asking me for my financial account information, they asked me for the same type of personal information anyone would need to pull a credit report and get a credit score on me. This does include your social security number and there is no way around that, so at a certain level, you have to trust that the Credit Karma website is legit. So far, I havent heard of any rumblings that this is all a very elaborate identity theft scam, although that is no guarantee of anything.
Credit Karma Complaints
The number one CreditKarma complaint is that the credit score is not a real FICO score. However, it is based upon your actual credit report data.
As it turns out, I was buying my car off of its expiring lease when I discovered Credit Karma, so I was able to compare the score CreditKarma.com said I had with the one my auto broker pulled in order to do my car loan paper work. The scores were close enough to be considered identical. (Scores actually very depending upon which credit bureau is used and even from day to day depending upon new information being reporting and aging of old information, but in this case they were within 4 points of each other.)
Now what would make Credit Karma the must have personal finance service for financially savvy people is that it does not just offer you your credit score for free once, but says that you can come back and update it as often as you like. I dont know if there is a limit on how many times you can update, but I updated my free credit score from Credit Karma every month since May with no complaints.
In other words, I have gotten six free credit scores from CreditKarma.com without paying a cent, without buying anything, and without clicking on any advertisements. There are advertisements on the page, but unless they are the kind that pay just for showing up, they have earned nothing from me other than thanks and this review.
I recently setup an account for my wife (spouses can have very different credit scores even if everything is held jointly) and have started getting her free credit score as well.
I cant say that I expect Credit Karma to be in business long. I doubt that it can earn enough money on what it is doing to make a profit. It might even get shut down by Fair Issac somehow since they dont want people thinking of its flagship product as free. If Credit Karma does succeed, then it wont be long before copycats are all over the Internet. But, no matter how it turns out down the road, for now, Credit Karma is a great deal for people managing their money.
