Credit Karma Free Credit Score Monitoring Service, Dividend Reinvestment at TradeKing, and Delivery of My Silver Coins

Nowadays, you can get a lot of stuff for free, news, music, movie, as long as you read/listen to/watch the ads that come together with the free stuff. You can even monitor your credit score for free, says CreditKarma.com, a newly launched credit monitoring service that promise free access to their own version of credit score for everybody.

You may be curious why CreditKarma can afford to provide a service for free when everybody else in the same business is charging a monthly fee (check out available credit monitoring services). According to their FAQ

Our free credit scores are sponsored by partners who share our vision that consumers should have free and regular access to their score.

That’s why. I wonder how long this kind of free service can last though if the sponsors don’t get what they expect from users of CreditKarma.

BTW, the CreditKarma score is different from FICO score, or any score from other credit agencies. It has a range from 300 to 900. In my opinion, the absolute number itself is not important. What’s important is the score’s relative position in the score range.

For more information, check out discussions on My Money Blog and FatWallet.com.

Last week, I was frustrated by the process to set up dividend reinvestment at Zecco. It seems that dividend reinvestment is not automatic at every broker. I checked my TradeKing account and didn’t find that option either. When I contacted TradeKing via Live Chat, I was told that I have to request a DRIP program, either for the entire account or a particular security. While it wasn’t as straightforward as I expected, TradeKing did help me set up the DRIP for my account over Live Chat without requiring any extra document.

BTW, TradeKing offers fractional share purchase with dividend distributions, unlike Zecco which insists only whole shares can be purchased with dividends.

Finally, I requested a delivery of a few silver coins I bought last year from Bullion Direct. When I made the purchase last May, the price of an American Eagle Silver Coin was $14.37 and a Canadian Maple Leaf Silver Coin was $13.82. The American Eagle is currently priced at $18.32. The reason I didn’t ask for shipment when I bought the coins is the shipping and handling cost was almost equivalent to a coin. It doesn’t make sense to pay 100%, 50% or even 20% of the total value of the shipment on S&H. So I wait until I accumulated enough coins to make the shipping cost worth it.

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