The Sun's Financial Diary

The credit market sure has changed a lot over the last several years. It was not too long ago that you didn’t need to do much more than show up in a mortgage lender’s office, tell them how much you wanted to borrow and have them cut you a check. Verifiable income and good credit [...]

I purchased a credit score the other day, using myFICO’s 26% off coupon code. The reason was that it has been almost a year since I last checked my FICO score in last January. A lot of things has happened since then, with the biggest event being that we are no longer homeowners, and the [...]

I have been using Credit Karma to get free credit score for quite some time now. What I like about Credit Karma is the I can update my score as many times as I want, though the score is unlikely to change if the update interval is too short. While Credit Karma is a nice [...]

I wrote a lengthy review of CreditKarma back in March. At that time, I thought I could use the free service to monitor my credit score because, though it isn’t really the FICO score, I can still use the relative changes to have an idea on how my credit score moves. Now, after six months, [...]

I always consider myself pretty good at managing my own credit. Then last week, I had this idea of getting a credit monitoring service. The reason is because of some recent activities in my credit that could have a negative impact on my score. First in June, when I got my current job, I signed [...]

The free credit score offer seems to be back again. I got my free Experian PLUS score back in April when AMEX offered the deal to cardholders. Though it’s not the most widely used FICO score, it should still give you an idea of your credit worthiness if you haven’t checked your score recently. And [...]

I have been getting free credit report for years. Before there was the law that entitles every consumer a free report from each credit agency every 12 months, I requested my reports directly from Equifax, Experian, or TransUnion for free. Then after the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) became law, I started to use AnnualCreditReport.com [...]

If you are an American Express cardholder, you can view your Experian credit score and credit report for free. This isn’t the FICO credit score that’s widely used by lenders which you can purchase from myFICO.com. It’s in fact the PLUS Score developed by Experian. In February, Experian decided to end its 6-year relationship with [...]