We have been paying off some bills with our tax refunds, and I have been anxious to see what kind of positive impact that will have to my credit scores. The first step I took was to log into my Credit Karma account and pull up my latest score (for free), which is determined based on the TransUnion credit bureau information.

The first major thing I noted was the layout of the Credit Karma pages had been redesigned. However, what ultimately really surprised me was to see that there was no place to “update” my credit score. The site automatically updated my score for me. Ok, I am fine with that.

The thing that alarmed me though was the little note next to my score.

There in front of me was a new note that said I needed to wait a week until I could update my score again.

Credit Karma was always founded on the principal of being able to update your credit score once per day. The great thing is that checking your score with Credit Karma had no bearing or impact on your scores performance.

So I reached out to Credit Karma to check on why the system was being redesigned.

When you log into your Credit Karma account, your score will automatically update if it’s been more than seven days since your last update. All you have to do is log in to initiate this update.

In your dashboard, you’ll see the date when your score was last updated as well as when a new score will be available for you.

Creditors send updates to the credit bureaus once a month, so credit scores typically do not change daily. We decided to make the Credit Karma experience more seamless by automatically updating your credit information for you weekly when you log into your account.

If you receive a credit monitoring alert about something important changing in your TransUnion credit report, your score will be automatically updated the next time you log into Credit Karma.

All of this makes our score updates more intelligent and keeps you focused on only important changes to your credit. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

While I agree that creditors update your information once per month, it is not standard when in the month this happens. Therefore, on Monday of one week XYZ could send updated account information to the credit bureaus, and on Tuesday company ABC could also do the same thing. The problem I see with this new weekly score update is that there is no longer a way to directly see which reportings directly impact your score.

If on Wednesday of the week where several creditors updated your information, you now might need to make a guess at which line item raised or lowered your score, where as before you could track daily which creditors information effected your score positively or negatively.

Upcoming Credit Predictions

What I discovered Credit Karma now includes, and maybe it was there prior and I just never noticed it, is a prediction of when creditors will be reporting your new information. If you go to your Alerts page, you will see a calendar view. By either scrolling over each day, or viewing the list below, you can now determine when creditors expect to report your information to TransUnion. Credit Karma is sitting on a huge pile of data not only from you, but everyone else, that I would venture to say pretty accurately can determine when new information is transferred over.

By using this tool, you now might want to plan out your logins to Credit Karma to accurately capture the most recent data and prevent you from missing that one creditors information in your weekly pull.

Wrap-up

I value a free system to monitor people’s credit, and am really appreciative of Credit Karma’s existence, as it is a powerful tool for the consumer and those of us who like to use our credit to its maximum potential by opening up new lines of credit for rewards.

The reality of what is really going on, I presume, is that Credit Karma is trying to curb some of its costs. They purchase your credit report from TransUnion and calculate your score on a similar method. By cutting down to only pulling your report weekly, there was some cost savings on Credit Karma’s part. Credit Karma makes their money off of the associated products you get pitched while researching your own credit. If less people are opening up lines of credit than are pulling their reports, the math simply needs to be revised, which is at the heart of what is really going on.

Regardless, I am still happy to see Credit Karma is still able to offer their credit score system for free to the consumer. What could really do wonders for Credit Karma is if they could work some exclusive deals with the credit card issuers, similar to what CreditCards.com is currently doing. Until then, I think the educated consumer will continue to use their free credit information to hunt out the best offers possible, which is happening with affiliates everywhere.

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Source: InACents