UPDATE: All new signups for Credit Sesame will be automatically entered to win a $250 cash prize through June 22, 2012!
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. So what’s the big deal? Its that they want you to sign up and show you other offers on how to refinance your loans (it seems to be purely informational) and then give you the opportunity to refinance through them. But just because they offer that doesn’t mean you have to do it.
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 signed 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.
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 (see the 11-MAY from today’s scan?) 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.
One extra fun thing they do is send you emails to let you know how you are doing. Now please know we only share this with you because we want you to know where we have come from. Our credit was so bad that we got to a point that we couldn’t get any more loans – we told you that right before we starting working through paying off our debt that we had to start getting Payday loans. It was the only option we had with the credit scores we both had. So I bet you can imagine how excited I was to receive this email just two years after paying off our final consumer debt (it can take years to repair your credit), giving me just one more confirmation that all that work paid off.
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!
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