We’ve posted about this before and now it is available again, but not only that – they are giving away $300! To be entered to win, you get the benefits of checking your credit score for free (details below) and you are automatically entered. The giveaway ends on 10/31/12, and the drawing will be 1-2 days after this.
This is a really nice and free tool that we have used and appreciated to have for many reasons.
Here’s the information that we posted before when we posted this early in the summer.
Well, you may wonder why we are posting this. Why is a couple that promotes paying off debt and working towards your financial goals (without more debt) promoting a tool to track your credit score? We just shared our 2×2 Plan where we paid off $100K of debt. Does this even make sense?
It does when you consider using a tool for your purposes. Credit Sesame is a free tool that you can use to get your credit score each month, view your debt balances broken down into simple categories, amongst other tools. During portions of our debt-payoff, we were paying a fee each month to evaluate our credit reports and balances. It was a helpful and motivational tool to have. We still check our scores and credit today, but for a different purpose now that we are free of our consumer debt.
Here’s what we read about Credit Sesame:
Credit Sesame is a free online personal finance tool that gives consumers an easy way to monitor and manage their credit and loans all in one place and save money on debt. It provides consumers with free access to their credit score every month, analysis, advice and tools to take control of their finances, unlock their credit potential and borrow smarter. The greatest perk of Credit Sesame, it’s 100% Free! They don’t require a credit card, and there are no trial periods.
$250 is what you can win by signing up with Credit Sesame. But you can save even more by using them as well!
When we say to use the tool for your purposes, what we mean is use this tool for the reasons you want to use it.
We are not too concerned about our score at this point, being debt-free makes this a huge advantage. But we did sign up with one purpose in mind – make sure we don’t see any loans show up on our account or changes to our credit scores (one for each of us) each month. If we see a mysterious loan added to our account next month, we know we need to take action immediately. If we see our monthly update to our credit score drop all the sudden – we need to find out why. What we are doing is trying to use a tool to protect our family and at the same time not have to pay $14-$20 per month, which is what many people do pay to check their scores and credit.
We use Credit Sesame because its one of the tools we depend upon to protect our family from identify theft. But you always have to be careful of free tools – how can you trust them? Here’s a couple of things you can find right on their site:
- They don’t share any of your information at all unless you request them to. Even their employees don’t have access to your data. Its secure and encrypted. That’s important to us.
- They are certified by the big security companies. You can even tell from the image below that McAfee runs a daily scan on their site to ensure it meets their security standards, which McAfee states “help protect you from identify theft, viruses, spyware, and other online threats.”
- They have been featured in major media which helps calm us and let us know they are legit! Just because a company offers something for free doesn’t mean we should use it. But when they are certified, we see them all over the internet and are featured by large news sources we can take comfort they are a safe option for us.
Finally, we encourage you to sign up twice – once for you and once for your spouse. You both have different social security numbers, you both are suspect to identity theft and we know first hand how things can “pop-up on one credit report” but not on the other. You will need to sign up with different email addresses (standard security practice) due to privacy laws.
Sign up today for FREE and give yourself a head start to track your credit monthly and give yourself an extra sense of security by knowing you have visibility to your report – and all for FREE!
See more financial tools and resources here!
Leave a Reply