@Anonymous wrote:
Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. I do understand and have heard about the different scoring models out there etc but I figured CK would be off some. The 60 points is mindblowing and I'm not sure what use they are but if there are some powerful ways to use CK I'd like to hear about them if you don't mind.
Sure! The first and best way to use Karma is as a one-stop shop for obtaining your EQ and TU reports. Reports (as distinguished from scores) are so important. They help you find out when CC balances have updated and tons of other stuff. Karma is also nice for assessing basic stats like CC utilization. But ignore what Karma's front end summary page says about AAoA (Average Age of Accounts).
A really sweet thing about reports at Karma is that fresh versions are available as often as once a week. That's a big advantage over a credit monitoring product like myFICO Ultimate, where you can only see your reports once every 90 days.
Another nice use for Karma is as a way of tracking your Vantage scores over time. In this sense, you are not using the score to figure out "what will my lender pull when I plan for loan X next week?" Even if the scores were FICO 8 Classic scores the score your lender pulls could be very different. (Happy to give you a lot of examples of how that can and does happen.)
Rather, you are in this sense tracking the Vantage scores against themselves over time -- to see whether your general credit profile is gradually improving. That can be useful to anyone who wants to see if things are generally getting better, as his derogs fall off, as his accounts get older, as his CC utilization is paid down, etc.
Finally Karma is the only place where you can obtain and track for free a credit score used by the auto insurance and home insurance industry. This is NOT the Vantage score that you see at Karma, nor does the industry generally use FICO. Being able to look at this score can be valuable as you assess how you look to insurers. Just bear in mind that its ranges are very different. An 831 score is amazingly good at FICO and at Vantage, but it is a mediocre to bad score as an Auto Insurance score.
