Quizzle.com Review Scam or Legit Site For Free Credit Scores?

Quizzle is now dead, for more information go here.

Quizzle was launched in 2008 and is owned by Dan Gilbert (who also owns Quicken Loans). They claim to be the first consumer website to offer completely free credit scores (although Credit Karma launched one year earlier).

In this review we look to see if Quizzle is a legit site to get a free credit score and credit report, or if it’s just another scam site that’ll take your credit card details and charge you.

Quizzle Credit Scores

Is It Really Free?

Yes, the score they provide you with is free. There is no need to enter your credit card information, unless you want to upgrade to one of Quizzle’s paid plans (which we don’t recommend doing as they don’t represent good value for money).

The score is updated whenever you update your credit report (which can be done for free once every 180 days or you can pay to do it at any time)

Is The Quizzle.com Score Accurate?

The quizzle credit score (which is now V3 of the VantageScore) when compared with a FICO score is usually on the low side. For example my FICO score is 821 and my Quizzle (or VantageScore) score is 746 which is difference of 75 points. So if you’re quizzle score is quite low, don’t worry. It’s not a score lenders look at and most consumers have a score which is ~50 lower than their actual FICO score. If you are on the lookout for a new credit card, auto loan or mortgage or want to refinance it’s a good idea to know what you’re FICO score is before doing so.

[Read: How To Get A Free FICO Score]

How Is The Vantage Credit Score Calculated?

This score is calculated by using 6 different categories: Payment history, Age & Type of Credit, % of Credit Used (also known as credit utilization ratio), Total Balances/Debt , Recent Credit Behavior and Inquiries Available Credit.

Our Thoughts

Overall the score they provide you with is pretty useless. It’s a VantageScore which is used by lenders, but not in many lending decisions. Because of the big differences that can occur between the scores, it can be extremely hard to compare.

[Read: VantageScore vs FICO score]

Quizzle Credit Reports

One great feature about Quizzle is that they give you access to two free full Equifax reports (unlike Credit Karma & Credit Sesame who only offer access to partial reports). One complete report is given to you upon sign up and then you can access your second report after a period of 180 days.

Quizzle Credit Tools

Quizzle offers a number of credit tools freely, which allow consumers to better education themselves on how credit scores are calculated and how to improve these scores.

Credit Analysis

The credit analysis tool shows a breakdown of your credit score, this shows both the positive and negative factors affecting your score. Areas that are effecting your score the most are highlighted.

It’ll also show you the potential improvement points you have in each category. For example, if you have a high credit utilization (e.g 80%) it may say you have a potential 30 points in that area and then tells you how to realize those points (in this case by paying off your credit utilization ratio to a more manageable level under 10%).

Click here for a sample screen shot of the credit analysis dashboard.

Credit Comparison

This tool allows you to compare two credit reports to see the key differences and how these differences have affected your credit score.

It’ll also highlight each difference as either a positive or negative and explain why this is the case.

Click here for a sample screen shot of the credit comparison dashboard.

Credit Timeline

The credit timeline shows key events over your credit history and allows you to see if these events were positive (causing your credit score to climb) or negative (causing your credit score to fall).

This’ll only show major events that have caused a big impact (e.g applications for new credit, late payments, etc), but can be useful to see where you’ve had financial trouble and where you’ve had financial success.

Click here to see a full screenshot of the credit timeline dashboard.

Credit Trending

This allows you to see how your credit utilization, VantageScore, available credit & balances have changed (or trended) over time.

Click here for a full screenshot of the credit trending dashboard.

 

Credit Monitoring

Credit monitoring allows you to be notified by e-mail whenever a major change was made to your credit report (e.g an application for new credit, bankruptcy etc etc). This can be useful for watching out for credit fraud or identity theft.

Identity Theft Protection

Quizzle offers $1,000,000 in identity theft protection insurance for individuals on one of their paid plans. It should be noted that like most ID theft insurance policies, this only covers expenses that are incurred in recovering a stolen identity and not funds that were stolen due to identity theft.

Tool Overview

This tools can be useful in educating yourself how certain credit decisions affect your VantageScore, but as we discussed previously most lenders don’t use the VantageScore and as such most of the educational value is worthless.

Other features such as identity theft protection are only available to those on the Quizzle paid plans and don’t provide the protection you’d expect.

Our Final Thoughts

It’s worth signing up to Quizzle purely to get access to the additional two Equifax credit reports they provide you with each year. We’d suggest skipping their over priced paid plans though.

The credit tools they provide are much better than those provided by Credit Sesame, but not as robust as those provided by Credit Karma.

At the end of the day, it’s another free credit monitoring service that doesn’t require a credit card to join and provides you with another two free credit reports which can be extremely useful for those trying to repair their credit.

Click to sign up to Quizzle.