Credit Sesame Offers Free Credit Score and More

Do you check your credit score regularly? If so, what service do you use? Paid credit monitoring services or free services such as Credit Karma?

I have thought about using a paid service, but ended up using Credit Karma instead because 1) it’s free, 2) my score is rather stable so I don’t need to keep an eye on it everyday (Credit Karma updates credit score every month). In addition to free credit score, I also get free credit reports every four months. With both the free credit score and report I got, I don’t think I will need to pay for credit monitoring. Besides, nowadays there are more and more ways to get credit score for free, even though they are not really FICO score (you can actually get free FICO score).

Recently, a new website, Credit Sesame, also starts to offer free credit score to its customers. The way Credit Sesame works is quite similar to what Credit Karma does: you sign up with Credit Sesame for free and by agreeing to provide your Social Security Number and allowing Credit Sesame to run your credit, you will receive a free credit score provided by Experian (Credit Karma uses TransUnion for its credit score offering). And when Credit Sesame runs your credit, it also analyzes your debts and comes up with money savings advices, which tells you where and how you can cut down your monthly payment and save money.

Since the service is totally free, the sign-up process is extremely simple. However, as mentioned above, if you want Credit Sesame to check and update your credit score, you will need to provide your SSN. Otherwise, you can still use the free service by manually entering your own data, such as your credit score and debt. Of course, you will have to do the manual update every time if you want to see analysis from Credit Sesame.

I hesitated about giving my SSN when I first knew Credit Karma, but now I am quite comfortable with it after seeing it improved in the past couple of years. So for Credit Sesame, I decided to give it try. From the above screenshot, you can see that in addition to credit score, Credit Sesame also pulled from my credit report loan and debt information, including mortgage and credit card balance, and used that information to calculate my monthly payment, then ran 8,093 scenarios to provide advices on who I can save money.

Even though I am fully aware of my loan and credit card balances, which I pay in full every month, I still clicked the money saving advices Credit Sesame provided to see what they got for me. The biggest debt we have right now is our 15-year fixed rate mortgage at 3.875% APR. And quite surprisingly, the advice from Credit Sesame on how to save more than $2,300 on monthly payment is the recommendation of replacing it with a 40-year loan at 4.88% APR. Well, I can’t say I am happy with this because the reason I got the 15-year loan is to save money in the long term, though right now I am paying a high monthly bill. Besides, who uses 40-year mortgage anyway. I think this is kind of extreme to suggest using 40-year loan just for the sake of reducing the monthly payment.  That’s not going to really save me money, isn’t it?

Anyway, I guess I will just use Credit Sesame as a tool to get a free credit score for now.

Do you want to try Credit Sesame?

Related posts:

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3. Credit Karma Now Offers VantageScore and Auto Insurance Score
4. Credit Karma Free Credit Score Service Can Help You in This Economic Environment: An Interview with CEO Ken Lin
5. Credit Karma Free Credit Score Monitoring Service, Dividend Reinvestment at TradeKing, and Delivery of My Silver Coins

Original Post on The Sun’s Financial Diary

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Credit Sesame Offers Free Credit Score and More

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