FiLife

Here at FiLife, we love credit reports. We love them so much, that we want free credit monitoring.

Well, it would also be nice to have a butler, a private island or a pony. But free credit monitoring seems totally doable.

First of all, your credit report is your life in credit, on paper. It can be ordered once a year, for free, from each of the three credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion). Checking it regularly helps ensure that your record stays clean of identity theft, because as we learned last week, no one is safe. Not only that, but the majority of credit reports have some kind of error, so getting that noise fixed will help you down the road when applying for that yacht loan.

Monitoring your credit report through FairIsaac costs $89.95 a year (that’s roughly 359 dumplings). That seems like a lot of money considering it’s our information. Conceptually, we have a hard time dealing with that one. And according to a recent survey from Synergistics Research, six in every ten people surveyed said that free credit monitoring from their bank would be valuable, while close to a third said it would be very valuable. The survey also found that four in ten people surveyed would be willing to open up a special checking account to receive free credit monitoring; one in six would be very likely to do so. The people want it!

Memo to banks: free checking accounts are common now in the banking world. Free checking is bomb, but it’s not enough any more, especially as fear of having our information breach continues to rise. Here’s a a new chance to lure eager, finance-info-hungry consumers into your banking nests and keep them coming back for more.

And in the meantime, we’ll keep saving up for the other things on our want list.

-Mary Pilon

Illustration credit

We’re still pissed we can’t get our credit score for free. And the world of credit scoring and credit reports is still pretty sucktastic. But it turns out that the folks at CreditKarma.com and Credit.com are trying to ease our woes.

CreditKarma provides customers with a credit score, but it isn’t the FICO score that most lenders use to evaluate you. It runs on a different scale (the top is 900) whereas the FICO reaches 850, so don’t get too excited if your score seems off the charts - CreditKarma just uses a different chart.

The site is still in beta and you need this code to get started. You plug in your personal information (they promise that it’s safe) and out turns a pretty little graph with some animation. CreditKarma gives you a list of ads (how they make money to support the site) related to how good or bad your credit score is, graphs showing how you stack up to other people in the country and how a potential lender might view you.

Credit.com, home of FiLife credit scoring guru John Ulzheimer, also offers a Credit Report Card that has a similar scale to the FICO (300-850) and also turns out pretty graphs and information.

And if you’re a Washington Mutual customer, you can get the real FICO score and related tools for free. All of the scores - CreditKarma, Credit.com and WaMu - use your TransUnion report to calculate the score.

In the world of personal finance, it’s exciting when people even know that they can order their credit report for free or if they’re even aware that they check their credit score. CreditKarma and Credit.com’s score exist for the population of FICOphiles out there who pay closer attention to their credit scores than the paparazzi does to Britney Spears.

If credit score monitoring is your new favorite pastime, power to you. But in general, you only need to obsess over your credit score if you’re applying for a loan of some type. And even after you’ve reached a certain threshold (a FICO of 760 or above will get you a sweet interest rate on a 30-year mortgage), you’re in the Promised Land. So sweating jumping from 799-800 might be fun forum discussion fodder, but won’t actually impact your wallet at all.

“I’m not sure artificial scores are ever helpful to consumers,” Ulzheimer says. “Except to provide a directional understanding of their score.”

But when it comes to anything credit-related, we’ll take directional understanding over, say, venereal disease any day.

– Mary Pilon

There have been a handful of occasions when I needed to call customer service about my husband’s credit-card account. I’m an authorized user on that account and have a card with my name on it.

But representatives always ask me to hand the phone to my husband, so that he can give them permission to speak with me. Instead of trying to deepen my voice by a couple of octaves — which I’m always tempted to do — I simply put him on the line.

It’s a minor inconvenience, but it made me think: is there a way we can get around this? If he’s traveling, or simply down the block at the gym, I should be able to call up customer service if I have a question about a random fee — and vice versa. (more…)

Although Mr. Freeze was a lame Batman villain, you can now use chilling powers for financial good.

As Ron pointed out a couple of months ago, putting a security freeze on your credit report prevents new creditors from accessing your credit file without your permission. Credit freezes used to only be available in certain states, but now all three credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion) will let you freeze your credit report regardless of where you live in the U.S.

Why would you want to put on the big chill? (more…)

In the dimly lit lounge of credit scores, the three-digit number that lenders use to evaluate your risk as a borrower, it turns out that there are a lot of posers — and occasional brass knuckles.

Let’s just make it simple, shall we? The one you want is the studly FICO score, which comes from a formula created by a company called Fair Isaac. Ninety percent of lenders use the FICO in some way shape or form. You can get it here. We’re not paid to say that, it’s just easiest.

The problem - and it’s one that many people fluent in other areas of personal finance don’t even realize - is that there is more than one FICO score. (more…)

Last week brought the welcome news that all three of the companies that track your credit history are going to start letting you freeze your credit file, no matter where you live in the U.S.

Credit freezes are the closest thing we have to a silver bullet against identity theft. Once your account is frozen, no new creditors can check you out unless you go back in and thaw the account temporarily with a special code.

Banks and credit-granting companies generally won’t open a new account in your name unless they can check the credit file. If a credit-card issuer can’t access the credit file (say, when a crook is trying to get a new card in your name), the card company simply won’t open the account. (more…)

Remember our query about why you can’t see your credit score for free? Turns out that Washington Mutual seems to be the only major credit-card issuer that offers this service. In fact, they’ve been doing this since 2005 as part of an agreement reached with TransUnion, the credit reporting agency that supplies WaMu with its customers’ credit scores every month. Those WaMu customers can see their scores on WaMu’s web site, for free, and WaMu doesn’t have to pay any extra money to provide them.

“It’s such a valuable tool for consumers,” Alan Elias, WaMu’s senior vice president of card services says. “Why not offer it?”

Why not indeed, given that that the banks don’t have to pay to offer this service?

Here are the excuses reasons that some major card issuers — the ones that responded to our queries at least — offered for not offering credit scores up gratis. And if you don’t like their answers, we’ve offered convenient links to their customer service pages.

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Is your credit history a reflection of your character? Your employer may think so.

According to a study conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, 24% of employers always run credit reports when considering potential hires. Another 19% of employers do so sometimes. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, they need your written permission to do any checking at all.  

The pro-credit-check argument goes like this: If you’re applying for a job where you’ll be handling your employer’s money, then the company needs to know if you are able to manage your own. If you have outstanding credit-card payments or unpaid utility bills on your credit report, you are more likely to be irresponsible in the workplace (i.e. show up late, misplace things) or even worse, steal. Theoretically, companies can even continue checking your credit history after you have become an employee or when considering you for a promotion. At FiLife, the company reserves the right to check but your credit history isn’t exactly a front-burner issue.

If your credit report contains a bankruptcy, repossessed assets or a defaulted student loan, then it makes sense that you might seem reckless or incapable of handling responsibilities. But what if a cell-phone bill gets lost in the mail or your student loans get too much to bear one month? Could this keep you from getting hired? It’s hard to know, but the opportunity is there for companies to take a peek.

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Sometimes I feel like my head will blow up.

And out will gush numbers - my social security number, my checking and savings account balances, my account numbers, PINs, my student ID number, my GPA, my credit card numbers, locker combinations – gah!

But all of those are readily accessible to me without any cost. So why can’t I see my FICO score for free?

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