I have been using Credit Karma for a while now to track one free credit score. They recently introduced the Credit Report Card which gives you a grade on various aspects of things that make up your credit score.

If you are not already a member of Credit Karma I suggest that you go over there right now and sign up for an account. You enter a bit of information about yourself and authorize them to pull your credit report. This will be a ‘soft’ pull since it is was requested by you and will not adversely affect your credit report.

If you had gotten a ‘hard’ pull like from having a company check out your credit report for you to open a new account then that would have a negative effect on your credit report and would lower it a few points.

If  you are already a member then you need to log in to your account and click where it says Credit Report Card, below where you normally click to get your updated credit score.

I got an A for Open Credit Card Utilization as my utilization (percent of credit used compared to total available credit) is at 19%.

While this is still a high figure among PF Bloggers (generally less than 10% is optimal) it is still showing my credit card companies that I am being responsible by not needing to use too much of my available credit.

It means that I am only using 19% of the total credit that I have available to me and therefore I might not be a big risk to t he credit card companies when it comes to my ability to repay what I have used.

openutilisation

I also got a good credit score weighting because I have a healthy credit score that is currently above 700. According to Credit Karma (which only reports one score) my credit score now sits at 755 and it has been steadily climbing since I started using the service to track my credit.

I then went on to check a few other grades and as you can see from the images below I got a varying report card.

ontimeI got an A for having on time payments all the time. I pride myself on paying my bills on time and by using ING to manage my payments I can almost ensure that no bill is late. If you refer to my Zero Based Budget you will note that most bills are paid via credit card and then I use ING to pay off the card in full every month.

Other bills that cannot be paid via credit card are paid through ING’s Electric Checking so that I can have paper checks mailed out or electronic payments sent if the bill allows it.

I got a D for the age of my credit lines because according to my files the average age of my credit cards is 3 years 8 months. I do have a card that is 9 years old but the other main card that I use is only about 2 years old so I am guessing that the averages are about right.

I got a C for total accounts because it says I have 27 accounts on file. This includes credit cards and the car loan but does not have a mortgage because I rent. It was interesting to note that the 27 accounts takes care of both open and closed accounts that have not dropped of my credit report as yet. At the time of posting I had 13 open accounts and 14 closed accounts which are set to start dropping off my credit report in December 2009.

I got a few more grades at different levels and the lower ones are just a guide on things that I need to work on in the future to improve my credit standing (cue Shawn who hates credit scores in 3, 2, 1) so that when I do get ready to apply for a mortgage I can get a better rate.