2)This article is for something completely different, with nary a TV jingle repeating “free” over and over again.

3)As far as I’ve seen, this site has never pimped freecreditreport.com without warning you that there’s a fee attached if you don’t cancel during the free trial.

4)READ when you agree to things ESPECIALLY on the Internet. Good God, man.

I don’t agree with the concept of an arbitrary score in the first place. You should have just a credit report. If you want a loan, an actual human being should look at your report and decide based on your actual history, ie facts, whether or not they feel you are a good credit risk. A score is just a way for them to say, oh, I am sorry because your score is only 680 you don’t get the good rate.

With this scoring system, you can pay all of your bills on time, never have an issue and still not have a very good score. What if you are moving along fine, and then one day, your credit cards drop your credit limit to your balance that you owe. Happening to people all over the country for no other reason than the creditor is contracting lines of credit. All of the sudden you can go from 750 down to 650 and it is something that you have no control over.

If there was no “Score” well then you would have to have an actual human (remember when corporations had Humans do things)look at your report, and they might have a question. Everything looks real good except please explain why you maxed out all of your credit cards. Oh, I didn’t I actually carried fairly small balances on them but last month a few of my creditors lowered my credit limit because of the financial crisis. Oh, ok that makes sense, here is your loan.

This entire secret score thing is bogus.

Just my two cents, anyone else agree?

So now a consumer like yourself walks away and can easily think, wow, I should apply for new cards all the time. Just a 1 point hit?

I just have experienced a lot of crazy volatility with this score. For example, it does not properly take into account no-preset spending cards so your score drops and that report card says your maxed out when you really are not. (it was simply the score looking at your high balance as your credit limit instead of looking to see it was an “OPEN” card and that it should not be used in utilization) which my FICO score properly deduced.

Then I have had instances where my score is higher that friends who have longer histories, with better characteristics, according to FICO!

Then there was the time I looked at my “Credit Snapshot” and it stated I should pay my bills on time more often, when I never paid my bills late ever!

Granted, Transunion is probably feeding this information to CreditKarma, my point just is that there is a danger that this product can cause more confusion when it’s not using a stable and commonly used score. It’s a great offering I just don’t trust the score.

Wondering because of the prompt you receive when updating…