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Credit Karma’s Hidden Features
Use Credit Karma to freely update your TransUnion credit score whenever you want? I do. But what I didn’t know is that it can tell you SO MUCH MORE than just your credit score.
When you log in and update your credit score, this is what you’ll see. And yes, for those wondering, that is my awesome credit score, which just went up 8 points today by virtue of AES finally reporting my account as current. What we want to click on is the Credit Report Card.
There, a wealth of information awaits you. Credit Karma offers up grades and statistics on seven different aspects of your credit report, and allows you to compare each factor against all other Credit Karma users.
For example, I get a big fat F for making payments on time. I point this out because this is the area I’m focusing the most on with my credit report, and now that I’m caught up with everything, it’s only a matter of time til that grade and percentage goes up.
But wait! There’s more! If you click on the More Info link, it shows you your exact numbers from your credit report. I, for example, have made 194 payments, of which only 179 have been on time. This puts me in the 13th percentile of Credit Karma users. A spiffy little graph to track your progress over time is below that.
Credit Karma offers up the following categories, of which I’ll helpfully list my score. Feel free to share how you stack up as well:
- Open Credit Card Utilization – 0% – C – $0/$0 – Well, duh, that’s because they closed it and sent it off to collections.
- Percent of On-Time Payments – 92.27% – F – 179/194 – 13th percentile
- Average Age of Open Credit Lines – 3 years, 5 months – D – Oldest: 3 years, 10 months – 43.6th percentile – By virtue of my young age, I can’t help it, I swear!
- Total Accounts – 7 – F – 4 open, 3 closed – 20.7th percentile – See above, I’m sorry for not being more of a debtmonger.
- Hard Credit Inquiries – 5 – C – 52.6th percentile – I thought that many was a bad thing, actually, but apparently it’s so-so?
- Total Debt – $42k or so they say – Not Graded – 57.3rd percentile – This is the only graph that shows a noticeable change for me, going down.
- Debt to Income Ratio – 17% – Not Graded – No Comparisons (must be new) – This is almost laughable. It’s as if I have a ton of extra money to do with what I wish. Estimated monthly debt is a whopping $266. Right.
It looks like their credit simulator is working again. Not sure if it was broken for me, or for everybody, but for the past couple months it wouldn’t do anything for me. If I were to have on time payments for the next 6 months while reducing my debt by $5000, my score could be 597. $10,000 over 12 months of on-time payments only inches it up a bit more to 600.
So there you have it. You may have already known about the spifferificity of Credit Karma’s Credit Report Card, but I only discovered it just now, so that makes it special to me. Kind of like discovering what happens when you put a 9 volt battery on your tongue, and then running to tell all your friends, only to find out that they’ve known about it for years and it isn’t cool anymore.
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