#Find Out Your Credit Score For Free With CreditKarma And An Analysis of My Results

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Welcome to My Personal Finance Journey. If you are new here, please read the About or First-Time Visitor pages to find out more about us. If you would like to receive free updates on articles like this by email, then sign up here or you can subscribe to the RSS feed. Also, check us out on Twitter or Facebook. Thanks for visiting! Keep on learning!

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The title of the infographic below is Financial Responsibility in the United States. I have to admit that I literally laughed out loud when I saw this title (please pardon the reference to emoticon abbreviations i.e. LOL). Why did this title make me laugh, you may ask?

Simple. The concept of being financially responsible in the US seems to be becoming less and less important. Why own something when you can just buy the car or cell phone on credit, right? Therefore, maybe a better title to this graphic would have been Financial Irresponsibility in the United States?!

Regardless of my personal feelings on the situation, the infographic gives some important insight in to the credit scores of the US public. I ve tried to summarize these in bulleted form below:

• The average US credit score is 692.
  • A person s credit score can range anywhere from 300 (minimum) to 850 (maximum), with higher scores indicating a higher degree of credit worthiness and that you are more dependable in paying back debts.
  • A credit score of 720 is generally regarded as the minimum you want to have in order to qualify for the most favorable credit terms (think lower interest rates!)
  • I admit that the national average of 692 is slightly higher than I expected it to be, stemming from the magnitude of debt problems I hear about from friends and the financial media. 

• There is a clear trend that credit scores get progressively worse, as you go further south in the United States.
  • Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and Louisiana have, on average, the lowest credit scores and the higher occurrence of personal bankruptcy filings. 
  • This makes me wonder what causes this? Is it that financial education (both in the home and in schools) is worse in the Southern states? Do people just have less money? Is cost of living more expensive?
    • If any one has any theories on this, definitely chime in/comment below !

%img src="http://gator1523.hostgator.com/%3C/p%3E%0D%0A%3Cp%3Empfj/wp-content/uploads/blogger/-Jgke5KFBeM4/Tc5q-84MM9I/AAAAAAAAAr0/VUH8n4ww3Zc/s640/3928496281_f906248523.jpg" /%

How To Find Your Credit Score Absolutely Free (no credit card information required)

If you have read my previous series on building credit history and improving your credit score. you ll know that I am a big fan of using Annualcreditreport.com  to obtain my credit report for free once per year.

However, one thing that I have been making up stupid excuses about not doing is checking my actual credit score. One of the these less-than-robust excuses was that I didn t want to pay the $15-$30 to check my credit score through one of the three credit agencies Transunion, Experian, or Equifax .

But, this all changed last week when I was reading a blog post from a blogger friend describing her use of CreditKarma.com  to get her real time credit score absolutely for free at any time! Since it seemed to have worked for her and more importantly, be secure, I decided to give it a go!

• Go to https://www.creditkarma.com/signup .
• Create an account and password.
• Enter your personal information (note: this does include entering your Social Security Number).
• Confirm your identity by answering some simple multiple choice questions about your past (typical questions you have to answer when requesting a credit score/report).

Once you have done this, you will then be able to view your credit score. Sounds easy right. It is!