House Mortgage Mortgage Corp

Www Housemortgagemortgagecorp Tag Few Days 2010 09 01 Archive House Mortgage Mortgage Corp Credit Scores: Can You Get Them Free? -zz | 魔羯

Www Housemortgagemortgagecorp Tag Few Days 2010 09 01 Archive House Mortgage Mortgage Corp

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To get started, you have to set up an account and answer several
"identity verification" questions. While you don’t have to sign up for
any services or provide a credit-card number, you do have to provide
your Social Security number at Credit.com and CreditKarma.com.

Quizzle.com, by contrast, uses information you provide when setting
up your account to locate your credit report at Experian. Then it tries
to verify your identity using information in your credit report. But if
those questions are based on incorrect information—or if you can’t
remember the answer—you might be prompted to enter your Social Security
number.

Encrypted Data

All the sites say they encrypt any data that
are stored in their files. CreditKarma, for example, strips out any
personal account information from users’ data and immediately deletes
the Social Security number once it is used to pull a credit report.

Overall, the information the free sites provided matched closely
with what was in our actual credit reports. But the credit scores
varied from the ones we bought through AnnualCreditReport.com, since
they relied on different credit-scoring models. Despite the variations,
the free scores were in the same credit tier as the scores we bought,
giving us a good sense for how lenders would view our credit.

All the free sites provided a top-line summary of our credit by
highlighting the pieces of data that they thought we were most likely
to be interested in, such as how many open and closed accounts we have,
our total balances and whether there were any red flags that we should
be concerned about.

Credit.com’s Credit Report Card boiled down our 20-plus-page
TransUnion credit report into an easy-to-digest format. The report
graded us on a scale of A to F across key factors that went into
calculating our score, and showed us how important each factor was to
our score. While we scored a C-minus on "inquiries" (in part because we
recently refinanced our mortgage), that category made up only 10% of
our score. By contrast, we scored an A-plus on our payment history,
which made up 35% of our score.

Credit.com doesn’t yet provide an exact credit score, but estimates
where your score will likely fall across the credit-risk spectrum as
defined by five major credit-scoring models, including FICO,
VantageScore and other consumer credit scores. The site allows users to
get updated scores once a month for free.

Report Cards

CreditKarma.com, which also relies on
TransUnion data, gives you one of the same credit scores that
TransUnion sells directly to consumers. In addition, it provides a
report card grading consumers from A to F across seven key components
affecting their scores and ranks the importance of each factor on a
scale of high, medium or low. Users can also play around with a
credit-simulator tool to see how their scores might change if, say,
they applied for a new credit card with a $10,000 credit limit, or
foreclosed on their home. The site allows you to check your score every
day.

One thing Quizzle.com offers that the others don’t is a free credit
report—and the ability to dispute errors on your Experian credit report
on the site. In addition to the free score and report, Quizzle.com also
offers a number of mortgage-related tools, so you can see how much the
value of your house has changed. The site limits users to a new score
and report every six months.

All of the sites have been retooling their models to make their
scores more consistent with the scores most lenders are likely to use.
On Wednesday, for example, Quizzle.com—which is owned by Rock Holdings
Inc. and is in the same family of companies as mortgage lender Quicken
Loans—replaced the Experian score it had previously offered. The new
score is still based on users’ Experian credit files, but is designed
to more closely track FICO scores, which range from 300 to 850, the
higher the better.

The free sites also offered some helpful tips on how to improve our
credit. To keep our overall debt usage low, for example, Credit.com
warned us not to close any of our credit-card accounts, since that
could cause our "utilization rate"—the amount of available credit that
we’re using—to go up and our credit score to go down.

Instead, it advised us to cut up the cards to prevent them from
being used fraudulently. Quizzle.com also launched on Wednesday a
fee-based service ($75 for four months) that gives users personalized,
specific advice on what they can do to improve their scores.

None of the free sites share or sell your personal information with
other third parties, although they do aggregate users’ demographic data
to help other people see how their credit compares to others.

Pitching Products

There is some product pitching on the new
Web sites. Given its ties to the mortgage-lending industry,
Quizzle.com’s advice seemed more tilted toward mortgage-related
solutions. The site recommended that we consolidate revolving
credit-card debt into a mortgage as a way to improve our credit score.

CreditKarma.com pitched us various offers based on our credit
profile, while Credit.com offered us the chance to buy our credit
report and credit-monitoring services from its TransUnion partner.

We still aren’t convinced these sites are an adequate substitute for
getting your own credit report. The actual reports from
AnnualCreditReport.com provided many more specifics about our payment
history, previous employers and addresses. They also included account
numbers—making it easier in some cases to track down certain
accounts—and showed us which lenders had recently inquired about our
credit.

Write to Jane J. Kim at jane.kim@wsj.com