Money doesn't actually talk. We do.

Free credit scores! Well, sorta.

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