Most people understand the importance of knowing your credit score because it affects so many different areas of their life. While most people know that they should try to keep track of their credit score, they don’t want to spend the money to get a credit report every few months because of the extra expense. With this in mind, some have started to turn to a new service called Credit Sesame. What exactly is Credit Sesame and does it require you to spend any money or commit to doing anything?
How it Works
Credit Sesame is a new service that makes it possible to monitor your credit score and accounts. The basic idea behind this service is that Credit Sesame monitors your credit profile and then provides you access to your credit score every month. In exchange for this service, you allow Credit Sesame to send you offers for financial products that can improve your situation from time to time. For example, it checks out your mortgage and then sees if it can offer you a deal on a refinance that would benefit you financially. It looks at your credit card accounts and then determine if there are any better credit card interest rates or offers in the market. You are not obligated to sign up for any of the offers that they send you. If you do decide to sign up, they will make a percentage on the deal.
Fees or Obligations?
One of the nice things about Credit Sesame is that it is completely free on your end. You don’t have to pay any monthly fees or a one-time membership charge. In fact, you don’t even have to provide a credit card number like you do with some of the other credit monitoring offers. That’s because this isn’t a free trial offer like some of the other companies offer. There are a few other similar services out there that are willing to give you a 30 or 90 day free trial on their service and then they start charging you a certain fee every month after that. With Credit Sesame, you don’t have to worry about any of this. There are no hidden fees that you have to deal with either. It is 100 percent free to use and they don’t even have a way to charge you because they don’t ask for your credit card number.
Credit Score
Although the service is free, you should be aware of the credit score model that they offer. The service does not provide you with all three of your credit scores from the credit bureaus. Instead, it provides you with a credit score only from Experian. In addition to giving you the credit score from only one credit bureau, the score that you get is not the traditional score that you would expect to get if you bought a credit report.
When you purchase a credit score from one of the credit bureaus, you typically get your FICO score. This is the industry standard when it comes to lending. When you use Credit Sesame, the credit score that you get is known as the National Equivalency Score. This is a score that weights things a bit differently and is not exactly like the regular FICO score. This means that you cannot compare your score with other scores that you might have had in the past.
It does provide you with a scale that you can use to determine if your credit is actually good or if it needs some help. However, you aren’t really comparing apples to apples with this score.