Free credit reports with Credit Karma

You've probably been bombarded with offers for free credit reports or free credit monitoring.  Aside from from Annualcreditreport.com, which by law provides credit reports free of charge on an annual basis, you are likely to encounter 1-month trials and aggravating phone calls trying to cancel your "free" service.

Credit Karma works differently.  It's a true credit monitoring service that is really free.  You will have to put up with 1) giving some of your personal data to yet another Internet site and 2) advertisements.  You see, Credit Karma counts on its ads to pay for your credit monitoring.  Since it is free, you won't get the full picture of your credit (just from TransUnion), a real FICO score (instead you get a TransUnion risk score, which in theory is similar), and the full details of your credit report (account details are missing...you just get the highlights).

It's probably worth checking out if you are paranoid about your identity and credit, and they promise not to store your Social Security Number in their database.  It's also useful if you plan to apply for a lot of credit cards, because you can use the service for "bumping," the practice of removing hard credit inquiries from your credit report by flooding your reports with soft inquiries, which do not impact your score.