Credit Karma Beta: Free Credit Credit Monitoring + Linking of your Credit Card Accounts

Actually this information is incorrect.
You are confusing the credit scores from Experian,Transunion and Equifax with the FICO score. They are NOT the same.
The Experian,Transunion and Equifax scores can be determined by joining (and paying for) each respective website but this is NOT the score that credit card companies (and others) use.
They use the FICO score. This score is ONLY ONLY available at MyFico.com
There is only one FICO score and not three.

Also scores from CreditKarma and CreditSesame are known as FAKO scores. CreditKarma simulates a Transunion score and CreditSesame simulates a Experian score.
Now while both these sites are good at providing you an idea as to what your credit score with that credit agency is (usually the scores are usually off by about ± 10-20 points, but sometimes could be more), the only way to know your TRUE score (especially before doing something important) is the FICO score from myFico.com
That's the reason why someone might want to pay for their FICO score because as the previous poster said, you don't want to go in thinking you have a high score and then realize that you were off by 80 points.


And as to the second part "Unless you know all of the institutions criteria you have no real idea if you will be approved anyway"
Well, the 2 MAIN criteria that a credit card company looks for is credit score and no recent credit inquiries. This really brings in a lot of information.
A good credit score (more than 730) means a lot of things.
They know that you've been paying off your cards on time. That you've not had delinquencies. Because if you had any of these...you wouldn't have a good credit score.
That and next to zero credit inquiries in the past 8 months will get you approved for any credit card.
Ofcourse if you're looking for a loan or mortgage then you may want to have a year or so of no inquiries.

While anyway, your estimation of what it takes to get a score merely over 730 is grossly pessimistic. You can get a dozen hard credit pulls in a year and still sail well north of 750 because of other healthy behavior.
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The real value is in the data-mining of your credit card purchases. That is worth a RIDICULOUS amount to people. You might be surprised.

In one transaction I once bought diapers, cat food, KY, latex gloves, toilet paper, hot sauce, Lysol, NyQuil and zip ties. I'm sure that's worth something to someone.

Meaning you have ONE point of failure. If LastPass online was hacked, ALL your passwords will be stolen. Even big bank, retailers, credit card companies, governments have their server hacked. And who knows if LastPass is going to be bought by some company that you don't want them to own your data. Not going to put all my "passwords" on the "cloud".

While KeePass is open source and offline. Actually offline only maybe a good thing.

This is incorrect from what I have read in many places. If LastPass was hacked, they would get a pile of encrypted useless data. The way to get my passwords would be to brute force hack my master password, which if you create properly, is little to no threat...

Is this incorrect?

Unlike Keepass which is open source so many people have checked their source code to make sure it is secure, LastPass is closed source, no one really can confirm if the encrypted data they generated actually is secure. And we don't even know if they have put any "backdoor" into their product. Or if they have put in anything (like 3rd party ad software) in their product that can help them generate revenue. Pretty much you are putting your trust in a small company that try to make money with a free product (at least most people probably use the free version) that user allow for network access. And seems like LastPass has security breach (and XSS vulnerability which they said was fixed) in recent years.
While Keepass is open source and there is no need for user to allow network connection for this password storage product. And it is always good to support open source product.

When I used KeePass, I was saving the file to dropbox in order to pull the most recent version to my phone. I guess I am basically at the same risk level now as I was then, keeping some form of file containing my passwords somewhere other than just on my harddrive.

To anyone wondering, I contacted CK and asked how to go back to old CK from beta -- they said there is no way once you've switched.

To any CK shareholders or owners or managers or whatever reading this, see below:

We understand why you made the changes you made. Add new features, simplify the UI, make the product more attractive for new/incoming users...

...but right now, loyal long-term users are upset that this change has occurred. We fully recognize the 1-30 day posting of updated information from lenders to the credit reports, but we *still* like daily update functionality.

You should have baked in a large warning that once you try the beta, you can't go back.

American Express CreditSecure and USAA Credit Monitoring are at least two well-known systems that allow daily updates. They cost a good chunk of money. I don't even care if Credit Karma decides to start charging a couple bucks for daily updating, but as it stands right now you have alienated more users than I think you realize with this change.

Please re-consider. As it stands now, Credit Karma has gone from being a daily tool I interact with for monitoring, updating, and reading reviews/leaving reviews -- to something I have no desire to use at all moving forward.