Credit Karma Review

Checking your credit score used to be way more difficult than it needed to be.

Citizens of the United States and Canada are entitled to one free copy of their credit report every 12 months, but you wouldn’t know that if you visited any credit bureau’s website to request one.

Credit bureaus are notorious for touting their monthly paid credit monitoring subscription services right at the top of their homepage and burying the form needed to request your free annual credit report.

That’s where companies like Credit Karma solve this problem. They make it easy to see your credit history, and therefore, your credit score, for free. Credit Karma makes that happen not just once a year but every month, and in exchange, they try to solicit you to sign up for various financial products. Sound like a fair arrangement? Well, let’s dive a little deeper into WealthRocket’s review of Credit Karma.

To use Credit Karma, you can sign-up for a free account with an e-mail and password and submit personal information. You will need to provide your address, your phone number, and your Social Security Number (SSN) if you’re in the US or your Social Insurance Number (SIN) if you’re in Canada.

You’ll then have to provide details about what’s on your credit report in a multiple-choice format.

Once that is complete, your credit score and the details of your credit report sync with your Credit Karma account, and you can log in to check your score or the details of your credit report (provided by TransUnion) at any time.

Credit Karma will also send you weekly e-mail updates letting you know when your credit score has gone up or down, and once you get to the site to take a closer look, you will see a chart that tracks the fluctuations of your score from month-to-month for as long as you’ve held a Credit Karma account.

When your credit score goes down, Credit Karma offers basic credit advice such as, “Make sure you keep your credit utilization below 30%.” When it goes up, you’ll get a feel-good e-mail saying, “You did AWESOME this week.” This can provide the benign motivation some people need to maintain good debt management habits and pay off their credit card balances.

Armed with your credit score and credit report, Credit Karma also shows you real-time credit card, loan, and mortgage offers tailored to your current credit score. The site can even tell you your chances of being approved based on your score and how many offers for credit cards with interest rates that you’re likely to receive from them.

You can also tailor the credit card offers you receive yourself according to categories such as building credit, rewards, or cutting costs.

Suppose you click on any of these offers, whether they be credit cards, personal loans, or mortgages.

In that case, that’s when Credit Karma makes their money, as they get paid by the credit card issuers, Netso, and Loan Connect when their account holders apply for whatever financial products are on the table for them.

Who owns Credit Karma?

Credit Karma is one of the many products owned by Intuit.

Intuit is the same financial software company that brought you TurboTax (the tax preparation software), QuickBooks (the accounting software for small businesses), and Mint (the personal budgeting and expenses app that can sync to your bank account).

For Intuit, this is a relatively recent purchase. The company announced it had acquired Credit Karma and it’s more than 100 million members across Canada, the US, and the UK for approximately $7.1B in cash and stock on February 24, 2020.

When it comes to Credit Karma, the pros far outweigh the cons. In fact, when it comes to cons, it’s difficult to find any that don’t move past the level of marginally annoying. If there are any negatives with this website (and that’s a matter of the user’s personal preference), they are minuscule compared to the benefits.

First of all, allowing users to see and track their credit score and credit report for free, whenever you want, beats dealing with the major credit bureaus Equifax, TransUnion, or Experian.

These bureaus obfuscate your ability to obtain your credit score and credit report for free in favor of getting you to pay for the privilege as part of a subscription.

Always knowing your credit score, including the likelihood of approval for some of Canada’s most popular credit cards, could help you gain control of your finances. This can increase your ability to apply for loans or mortgages, and equip you with right tools to pay down debt such as credit cards, student loans, or auto loans. On the contrary, you may feel overwhelmed with grants for those same loans, mortgages, and credit cards in this exchange.

This could be a con for those who don’t like marketed to, but it could also be a pro for those who appreciate getting offers tailored to their credit score with increased approval chances.

Of course, you can ignore all of these offers, never clicking on any of them, and strictly using Credit Karma to track your credit, which is a major pro itself.

The only unambiguous finding is that creditkarma.ca doesn’t have as many features or offers as creditkarma.com. If you’re fortunate enough to be American in this case, you will receive offers not just for credit cards, mortgages, and personal loans but for car loans, car insurance, and home insurance.

Plus, Credit Karma in the U.S. allows users to file free tax filing and get their maximum refund guaranteed. They can also search for unclaimed money, monitor their accounts for identity theft signs, and open an app-based savings account called Credit Karma Money.

One can only hope these features come to Credit Karma up north someday soon, but until then, being able to monitor your credit for free without any further obligations beyond being marketed to is beneficial enough.