I know you have seen a million and one adds for free credit reporting. This is another one of those free credit report tools, only this one is actually free and gives great information. If you haven't heard about it yet, you should give creditkarma.com a try.
When you first sign up it asks for some basic information about yourself; name, address, phone number, DOB, last four of you social. Only the last four seemed odd to me. I figured you would need more than that. But then I got the ID verification quiz and it all made sense why they only needed the last four. They were going through a testing service to verify who I was, and that service probably has the rest. Or there is black magic that is unknown to me.
Anyway, on to the cool parts. So it pulls your credit in and list all open accounts that you have attached to your social security number. It found my credit cards, bank accounts, loans, etc. Anything and everything that might be affecting my credit.
It showed me all my open loans which included student loans. Those annoying things that will never go away, trust me they find you. At first I noticed, hey that value is higher than I remember. The second thing I noticed is was that one of these loans had missed a few payments. Mostly because I was unaware that I even had this loan. I thought I had consolidated all of these. So what was this random loan that was dinging my credit? If I wouldn't have signed up I wouldn't have known about this loan.
The next thing is that it gives you tips on how to make your credit look better. Trust me, if I could just put a bow on my score to make it better, I would. Things like your credit to debt ratio. I thought that as long as I used my credit card and payed it off at the end of the month would be fine, well sorta. As long as you are not using more than 30% of your available credit, you get a higher score. Any more than that, and your score starts going down.
Honestly though, the best part of the application is the dashboard. The dashboard allows me to link all my accounts into one screen. This makes life easier as I only have to log into one place to see all of my bank accounts and credit cards. The next thing I need to figure out it how to link my retirement and stock purchases into this tool and I will be set.
Also side note. If you request information on a loan, Credit Karma does not screw around. I request information on a loan to get a down payment on a car. About a dozen emails and actual pieces of mail later, I'm still getting letters from banks telling me rates and payment schedules if I wanted to get a loan from them. So be prepared to have applications for loans to become automated.
Combine this tool with http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/ and you will be set for awhile. Do yourself a favor and stay ahead of this shit early. 1 year of being stupid is now costing me 5 years of catching up.
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