Post Published on July 22, 2010.
Last Updated on November 29, 2017 by davemackey.
It used to be you had to pay to get your credit report, then federal law required the credit agencies to provide us with one free credit report each year. This was a huge step forwards but the interface was and still is tremendously clunky and once you’ve viewed it once – not the easiest to get back to. You can still get those official free credit reports from each of the three credit reporting agencies here.
Thankfully, newer and easier ways to gather your credit reports are now becoming available. I want to talk about two of these – Credit Karma and Quizzle.
Credit Karma offers you a free credit score pulled from TransUnion. It appears you can re-pull your score as often as you like. In addition to giving you visibility into your score and report, Credit Karma compares your score against other Credit Karma users, provides you with a Credit Simulator to see how various actions would positively or negatively affect your score, and provides customized offers for credit cards, auto insurance, home mortgages, etc. that could potentially lower your expenses. Credit Karma is able to provide the service for free by offering these sorts of targeted sponsor offers.
Quizzle is part of the larger conglomerate, Quicken Loans. Quizzle pulls your credit score/report from Experian. Unlike Credit Karma, you can’t repull your report any time you like for free – only once every six months – but hey, that’s still pretty good, right? Quizzle also offers a number of free features similar to those found in Credit Karma. Credit Karma also has some premium features you can purchase – but aren’t obliged to – such as basic and advanced credit monitoring on a more frequent basis. The prices aren’t bad – working up to around $8/mo.
Between these two services you can get two out of three credit reports for free. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of a similar service that offers credit pulls from Equifax. If anyone is aware of such a service – I’d love to hear about it.
Hello!
Just wanted to drop by and say thank you for mentioning Credit Karma! We strive to provide totally free and invaluable, helpful resources to consumers. And its not just credit scores you can score for free here. I hope you got a chance to also check out our Credit Simulator, which tells you how actions may affect your credit score, our Credit Report Card, which helps you understand what areas you can improve on to help your credit score, and our Blog, which posts fresh daily content to inform and empower you about your personal finances.
And hey, if you ever have any suggestions or issues or questions, please talk back with us! Tweet to us or post feedback on our Facebook, we’d really like to hear from you again.
Well, enjoy blog-writing today and have a great weekend. And again, thanks for the mention and we hope Credit Karma stays on your mind.
Cheers,
Justine