credit karma
a free Experian credit score via Prosper. You can already get free credit reports from AnnualCreditReport.com as well as in other special situations. But what about services like daily credit score monitoring?
Now, a new site called CreditKarma is offering free daily credit scores. For comparison, FICO’s own Score Watch program costs $89.95 per year. So what’s the catch?
1. It’s not a real FICO score. This is another FICO-clone, with a score ranging from 300 to 900. (FICO is from 300 
to 850.) It also doesn’t say from which bureau this score is based upon, as they say they can pull from any of the big three (Experian, Equifax, Transunion). My guess is that they’ll use whatever is available that is both cheaper than FICO and still reasonably accurate. That’s what I would do…
2. You only get the score. The service is pretty barebones. You don’t get information about who’s pulling your credit, how often they are doing it, or information about your existing credit lines. So the “alerts” feature is missing. Instead, the primary attraction is the ability to see trends – is your score increasing or decreasing over time?
3. They are advertiser-supported, so I guess they are counting on people to obsessively check their score every day. I’ve always been a bit mystified by such behavior, but I don’t check the stock market ticker all day long either. From their privacy policy it seems that they are using your personal information to target ads to you, but aren’t actually sharing your info with others unless you opt-in. I sure hope not! Lenders are setting the minimum credit scores for products anywhere from 20 to 50 points higher than they were in 2007, warns Ken Lin, chief executive of CreditKarma.com.
“Consumers are still having trouble finding credit products, particularly if they are kind of in the near-prime, subprime range,” he said. “Two years ago, you had a lot of options available to you. Today, you are going to be in a much more dire situation.”
Higher credit scores could also indicate fear that the recession isn’t over yet, Lin said. “When consumers are down on the economy, or when we’re in a recession, consumers tend to spend a little bit less, and that tends to boost their credit scores,” he said.
