For a few years, Credit Karma has been offering a product that lets consumers see what lenders and employers see when they look at the consumers’ credit reports. After securely and privately providing your personal information, Credit Karma retrieves your credit report from one of the credit reporting bureaus, either Experian, Equifax, or TransUnion.
Credit Karma then analyzes your details and assigns a grade, A through F. The various categories receiving grades relate to the items that determine your credit score. Lenders review these items when deciding whether to extend credit to you, how much credit to extend, and at what cost.
This is a free service, supported by advertising.
Yesterday, Credit.com announced they will also be offering a similar free service, providing a credit report card to help you evaluate and improve your credit report.
So which service is better? I took both services for test drives.
Credit report cards
Here are some of the most obvious differences. Credit.com assigns grades to the following categories: Payment history, debt usage, credit age, account mix, and inquiries. Credit Karma’s categories are similar: Open credit card utilization, percent of on-time payments, average age of open credit lines, total accounts, hard credit inquiries, total debt, and debt-to-income ratio. More categories, and therefore more information, is more helpful.
To look further into the health of my credit, Credit Karma offers charts in each category, placing my result within the spectrum of results from the Credit Karma Community, all users of the website. So I can see, for example, that the grade of “C” Credit Karma gave me for “Total Accounts,” which includes how those accounts are divided among revolving credit accounts and loans, puts me in a group of users who received an average score of 683, significantly lower than my score.
This tells me I’m doing well enough in the other categories to make up for this deficit but improving my mix of accounts will improve my score further.
I also received a grade of “C” from Credit.com for the “Credit Mix” category. Credit.com doesn’t offer a chart, but it does include details about my types of credit (23 revolving credit accounts, 0 mortgage loans, 1 auto loan, 6 student loans) and excellent suggestions for specific actions I can take to improve in this category.
Here are some screen shots. Click on the thumbnails to see the full-size images. Read the full article →
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Luke Landes founded Consumerism Commentary in 2003 and has been building online communities since 1990. Luke, also known as Flexo, has contributed to PC World Magazine, US News, Forbes, and other publications. 
Money With Your Honey, Tips for Freshmen, and the Frugal Life
This article was written by Luke Landes in Administration. 7 comments.
As I find time, I write articles for websites other than Consumerism Commentary. This will always be my home for writing about money, but I’ll take whatever opportunity I can to share my thoughts online with more readers.
Here are a few of the recent articles I’ve published around the internet. Please read these and participate by commenting if you are so inclined.
Combining Money With Your Honey. Can a couple where both participants have different attitudes towards money and different incomes survive in a relationship with combined finances? The title of this article doesn’t sound like me — I think my original title was, “How People With Differing Attitudes can Combine Finances.” I’m pretty sure the new title is an improvement.
Be the Big Saver on Campus. This article is a guide for first-year college students, known vernacularly as freshmen or frosh. I don’t remember thinking about money at all when I first entered college, but if I had I probably would have been in a better situation when I graduated.
Is the Frugal Life Here to Stay? I keep hearing about the “New Frugality” in the media, and I often receive questions about whether those growing up post-Great Recession will have adopted an entirely new lifestyle that will last until they die, like those who grew up in the Great Depression. I certainly have an answer for that question.
These are only the most recent articles. You can look forward to more of these in the future.
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