My credit score jumped 27 points today to 797

[Anonymous]

I logged into CreditKarma today to find updated scores for TU and EQ. I was surprised to see my TU score jumped 27 points. I am now at 797 (TU).  I paid off $2,000 in credit card balance I had tied to my Chase Slate account which was at 0% APR up until a couple weeks ago (rather than pay interest, I paid it off). I also got some $4,000 in credit line increases recently. 

Proud to say that I'm on the cusp of the 800 score club.  

I've been actively building credit since January 2014 - my first credit card was a secured card with Bank of America. Prior to 2014, I had to spend so many months getting my brother's credit information  (defaults) off of my report. We have similar names and similar SSNs. (I was down in the 500s because of that nonsense.) After months and months of writing to EQ and TU, they started to correcting everything so that I could start building my credit on the right foot/clean slate. 

I look forward to learning more about credit and credit management in the coming weeks, months, and years with ya'll here! Wooo!

cwill961 

[Anonymous]

A word of caution, Credit Karma provides you with VantageScore 3.0 scores.  They are not FICO scores, nor are they scores used by many lenders at all.  Your FICO scores could be higher or lower than your CK scores, and in some cases the difference can be significant. 

I'd suggest pulling your real FICO 08 scores.  If you go to Credit Check Total dot com for $1 you can get all 3 (TU, EX, EQ) of your FICO 08 scores.  After getting them, call up the automated system and cancel your trial membership.  In 7-10 days you will be able to pull your scores a second time for no additional charge.  By doing this you'll know exactly where you stand with your FICO 08 scores which are the most commonly used, far more common than VS 3.0.  For all you know, you may already be a member of the 800 club... or, you could be quite a distance away.  Until you get your geniune FICO 08's you won't really know.

[Anonymous]

I agree with BBS.  One tiny tweak to his advice....

If I were you I would wait until you can update your Karma scores one more time.  Since Karma will allow a fresh update as often as once every seven days, that should be very soon.  (Be sure you have waited until Karma is doing a fresh update on a new pull of your credit reports.)

Then, immediately after you pull your Karma scores, sign up for Credit Check Total and pull your FICO 8 scores.  (Or alternatively you could sign up for CCT and then immediately after that pull your Karma scores.  Either way, what you want is your Vantage scores and your FICO 8 scores all pulled within a few hours of each other and with fresh pulls of your credit report data.

This way you will be able to be confident that any difference you see between (for example) your EQ Vantage score and your EQ FICO 8 is attrubutable solely to the difference in the scoring models.  If you pull your FICO scores on Nov 2 and your Karma scores on Nov 10, then you won't know for sure whether or not the score difference is because something changed on the credit reports.

I think Karma is a great tool and very helpful for lots of people.  I encourage you to use BBS's advice about pairing it with the $1 CCT pull and doing that twice a year (just do it on precisely the same day).   After a while you'll have a very reasonable way to infer your FICO 8 from what you see from Vantage.