Credit Karma – Review

This website has it — a free credit score.  No really.  I mean it.  A free credit score?  What’s the catch you say?  The company is hoping that consumers will upsell to other products such as credit cards and other goods and services once they have their free score.  A close look at the privacy policy suggests that the site will not sell your information, nor share it with others.

Having met the CEO and knowing his background, I believe that the company is looking out for consumers.  They know that other credit report companies are getting accused of blatantly selling off personal information, so they are trying their best to help consumers understand their situation.

Here’s what the product has around your credit score:

• A credit score from Trans Union – not a FICO score, but hey it’s free
• A credit snapshot showing how you compare to other Credit Karma users
• Credit simulation – shows what if scenarios and what you should expect to have happen to your score

The second piece of the site is the product offers.  There are offers of all kinds including credit card companies, auto lenders and more.  Partners include ING Direct, Orchard Bank, Rudder, Discover Card and Quicken.

For more check out CreditKarma.com

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Credit Karma – Review

FICO® Standard – Review

FICO® Standard is the entry-level product from myFICO. For $15.95, it allows you to pull your FICO® score from Experian or Trans Union and then dive into all the details of your credit report.

The structure of this product is nice. They have 9 clearly labeled tabs divided into 3 areas:

• Credit Score
  • FICO Score Summary
  • Understanding Your Score
  • How Lenders See You
• Credit Report
  • Credit At-a-glance
  • Credit Accounts
  • Inquiries
  • Collections
  • Public Records
• Next Steps
  • Credit Disputes
  • Score Simulation

The Score Summary gives a quick overview of my score, but switching to the Understanding your score tab shows exactly what’s hurting and helping your score.  They’ve taken the “reason code” which can be a daunting industry term and translated it to things that hurt and things that help.

Next, the how lenders see you tab puts your FICO® score to work to show you your interest rate and payments tab.

The credit reports sections do a great job of being concise showing an overview of account status and then all your accounts on a single page.  Collection, inquiry and public record data can be viewed as well.

Finally, once you are through your reports, you can look for errors and dipute them with a tool that generates the letters for you.  You can also do “what-if” scenarios on your FICO credit score using the Score Simulator.

All and all.  This product has a lot of features for $15.95.

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FICO® Standard – Review

Suze Orman FICO Kit Review – $49.95

The Suze Orman FICO Kit includes most of the the credit features you see in many other credit products with a couple of other features. Right off the bat, you see that the product allows you to get 3 FICO score report pulls. But, wait, there’s a difference. These can be pulled in a number of different ways. For example,

• You can pull your TU and Equifax reports and FICO scores and save 1 pull for a later date
• You can pull your Equifax report and allow your sister and brother to each pull their Equifax [or TU] report.

The core features of the Suze Orman FICO Kit stem out of the Action Planner and it’s rich features:

• Examine Your FICO Scores and Reports
  • Your FICO Score
  • Understanding Your Score – Reason Codes
  • Credit At a Glance
  • Accounts
  • Inquiries
  • Collections
  • Public Records
• Find and Correct Disputes
• Debt Eliminator
  • Credit Snapshot
  • APR negotiating tips
  • Your repayment plan
  • Your FICO Future
• Mortgage Payments
  • Your Mortgage type
  • Your mortgage details
  • What the future may hold
• InfoVault

Suze wouldn’t be Suze if she didn’t offer advice, and she’s done a great job of organizing the product around the action planner. This includes dispute assistance, the debt eliminator, a mortgage payment watcher and the InfoVault. The dispute tool is neat as it has a simple process to generate a letter. The debt eliminator is a great tool to help you negotiate with credit card companies for better rates and develop an action plan to pay down your debt.

Watch the video to learn more. See our other credit product reviews as well.

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myFICO Suze Orman FICO Kit – Review

IDVault Review

The attached video is a walkthough of the newly transformed IDVault product.  If you’ve seen the hardware version of this with a USB token, the product is now software based.  Take a look at the video to how the product protects consumers from ID theft.

Pros: True “clean” free trial. No need for entering your credit card. Does a nicejob of making it easy for users to fend off keyloggers and phishers.

Cons: No mac version…yet.

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IDVault Review

Score Watch is the set-it-and-forget-it credit score product. This product is a subscription service which unlike many monitoring services pushes FICO credit score updates to you in the form of email and SMS cell text messages.

How Score Watch Works

Typically, a consumer will start using this product by pulling one of the 2 reports available, leaving the 2nd one for a later date. Once you get your report, the Score Watch platform keeps a history of your credit scores going forward and is checking to see when your score changes. But it also allows you to be notified in case you change interest rate qualifying bands.

Score Watch has five tabs that make up the product. The tab that means the most is the settings tab. Here you can set the score you want alerts when you reach that target. Next, you can set targets for account percentage increases, dollar increases (e.g. $500) and notification of usage of inactive cards.

The other tabs track your history and also show you

The company was smart about security in that you get alerts that say “ your score has increased by 11 points” instead of saying “your new score is 726”. This is nice should your email or cell phone be compromised at some point.

This is a great product for someone looking to find out exactly when their score peaks to apply for loans at the best time. It also works well as an ID theft product as ID theft would lead to a noticeable score alert.

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myFICO Score Watch with FICO Email Alerts – Review

FreeCreditReport Review

This is a review of FreeCreditReport.com also known as Triple Advantage.

Pros: Tri merged reports

Cons: No FICO scores, expensive.  Once was a 30-day trial and has been reduced to a 7-day trial.

We’ve all seen the ads and we’ve all heard the jingle, now let’s review the product.  FreeCreditReport.com aka ConsumerInfo.com aka Triple Advantage is owned by Experian, one of the largest credit reporting agencies.  This business is reported larger than $500MM in annual revenue and they boast of their 20 MM consumers you’ve seen their credit report.

How does the product match up?  It’s pretty similar to other monitoring products, which all feature good side by side comparison.  In the video, you can see examples where some tradelines are not captured by all three bureaus, so this is helpful for spotting errors.  The online dispute feature is not, but I don’t usually recommend this, as doing offline dispute letters leads to a better paper trail.

What’s in a Name?

A lot, “free” certainly implies free and it is …for 7 days.  The domain is also eerily similar to the AnnualCreditReport.com website.  I am not sure how the other bureaus really agreed on this.  Experian must benefit from consumers who think FreeCreditReport is the government sanctioned website.

Is it worth the $14.95/month?

I prefer the path of getting all 3 FICO score reports first and then monitoring your Equifax FICO Score via Score Watch.  Why?  Well, let’s do a little math.

• FreeCreditReport.com:  $14.95 * 12 = $179.40
• FICO Complete: $47.84 + Score Watch $8.95 * 12 = $107.40 =$155.24

This is a way to save money and still get your FICO scores.  Of course, AnnualCreditReport.com is always free for the reports but the scores will cost you extra and you won’t get alerts.

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FreeCreditReport.com – Review

There are many “free” sites out there – over 200 – but this is the government sanctioned site where you can get 1 free report from each of the 3 credit bureaus every year. But, be warned, scores cost extra! This review walks through the user experience.

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Annual Credit Report.com – Review

TrueCredit Review

TrueCredit’s 3-Bureau monitoring includes unlimited 3-in-1 Credit Reports & Scores for $14.95/month has a really nice user interface with its clean layout and it’s main advantage is that it features true tri-merged reports. This is useful as it allows you to see your 3 credit reports side-by-side.

An interesting note: the scores used are not FICO credit scores, they can be significantly different. In my case, when i reviewed this product, my TU FICO was a 790 and my TU non-FICO was a 739 — a 51 point difference. Many lenders might quote me a different rate for this.

The TrueCredit site has lots of promotions for items such as the mortgage simulator, which features are bundled in with products like Score Watch.

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TrueCredit’s 3-Bureau Credit Monitoring – Review