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Credit Karma’s My Accounts Feature
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Kenneth Lin emailed me the other day about a new feature in Credit Karma called My Accounts. It’s a simple listing of all your revolving accounts, like credit cards, and whether there are opportunities for you to move them elsewhere and pay less in interest. It’s best for folks who carry a balance but I think it outlines opportunities for anyone.
Here’s a look at what mine looks like:
How do they do it? They read it off my TransUnion credit report.
I’ve long said that CreditKarma is a cornerstone of my free do-it-yourself identity theft protection program and now this increases how valuable they are. In the past, I looked only at the CreditKarma score. That’s like assessing patient health using only their temperature. It’s a good warning sign if the number is not right but it only tells you to dig some more.
With My Accounts, I get another level of visibility – a list of my accounts. With this, I can see if there has been unauthorized access, accounts I don’t recognize, or anything else that could be going on. In return for this service, I let them market new cards to me.
For example, that Citi card with the $2,322 balance is my main credit card. If that were my revolving balance, I could try a balance transfer to the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card.
It’s on a delay. Remember it’s based on what is reported to TransUnion and that’s always on a delay. I recently checked my credit reports so I know that the $2,322 is what was reported on my credit report (that figure was last updated 10/13/2011 according to TransUnion). I did more research because $2,322 seemed high until I realized we made our annual car and homeowner’s insurance payments that month, in addition to our normal spending (which is closer to $1,000 a month).
(Incidentally, the AMEX was high too but again we had some annual payments put on that card as well. CreditKarma was smart enough to omit the two corporate AMEX cards though, points to them on that.)
Overall, I’m really pleased with what CreditKarma is doing to improve their service offering. They are continuing to offer new features that just make perfect sense.
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I created a Credit Karma account when you mentioned it last year and have found it to be quite useful. I’ve learned a lot about credit and risk scores with their explanations. I definitely like the My Accounts page.
How does Credit Karma’s pulling of one’s credit reports affect one’s credit score? I was under the impression that the more your report was pulled the lower you credit score.
It is not a ‘hard pull’ so it doesn’t affect your score at all.
If you initiate the pull, it is soft and will not count. If you go to a car dealership and they pull it, that is considered a hard pull and is on your record for 2 years.
Credit Karma is great even if you have a good handle on your finances because it enables you to measure the change in your score, even if it is a few points off of your “true” score.