Keeping track of all of those credit cards/miles - and your credit

The start of a thread to keep track of what you have - emphasis on free sites:

• For your cards and awards programs: Award Wallet; it keeps track of your reward programs such as your frequent flyer miles, hotel and credit card points: www.awardwallet.com
• Your credit: Credit Karma; receive your free credit score and credit report card with a few clicks. Free credit tools to track and optimize your credit score: www.creditkarma.com

There are many more - please add your favorites . . .

 

I use yodlee for all my accounts. It's a life saver.

 

For award programs, I use mileBlaster on the iPhone. I do get a bit weary of giving all of my login info to a third-party program, so I haven't ventured out to try any other consolidation programs yet.. so far no problems with mileBlaster though.

 

My combination:

1. Award Wallet - recent redesign notwithstanding, this is the best miles tracker. You can also input coupons and gift certificates (you have to manually update them, though.) I like the ability to make comments for each program... helps me sometimes with CPM that I should shoot for, etc.
2. Mint.com - great for keep track of your credit cards, especially transactions and due dates. Their email reminder service sends me an email 7 days before a bill is due.
3. Credit Monitoring Service - one of my Citi cards (can't remember which one) sends me an email anytime there's a new inquiry on my account. Not sure if they're still offering this service (it's free.) I use Credit Karma as well (also free, but not detailed like an actual monitoring service.)
4. YEARLY CREDIT REVIEW - not talked about enough but probably the most important... make sure you know what EVERYTHING on there is.

 

1. Award Wallet
2. Page Once - iPhone App for tracking finances
3. True Credit for credit report inquiries.

 

www.annualcreditreport.com

Can't beat free! Though the scores would be nice, its very important to make sure everything is showing up correctly on each of your credit reports. I try to rotate through a different report every 4 months to keep an up-to-date view on my credit report, and I track what my inquiries should be manually (and match up to each bureau's report once a year).

Its ridiculous how long the credit report gets with all those churned cards.

 

Award Wallet and make sure to get that free credit report. FICO gives away a full report with score once or twice a year too.

 

Getting through mine is a real chore but worth it... I wish they were listed differently or at least sortable (maybe in the future when it doesn't just spit out a .pdf.)

 

I use Awardwallet for the miles/points. I use True Credit for tracking credit info.

 

Yodlee is great, and it can track most rewards programs (the only one it doesn't have that I have is ANA) as well as all the credit cards, bills, and bank/brokerage accounts, and it's nice to have it all in one place.

I HATE their new look, but fortunately they included a "time machine" button on top so I can go back to the last look.

 

What I prefer/use (all previously mentioned):

• Mint.com: Great aggregator for financial information, CCs, bank accounts, investments, loans, etc... love the "trends" and "budgeting" tools as well.
• Awardwallet.com: Great aggregator for rewards programs. Really appreciate the auto-login feature. The free features are nice, but more is available for a small premium (as low as $5 for 6 months).
• CreditKarma: Awesome way to approximately track your credit score. It's based on Transunion alone however, and is not your "true" FICO score. Very helpful tool regardless.
• Annualcreditreport.com: The truly free credit report, as required by law. As previously mentioned, if you get one every 4 months from a different agency you can keep pretty close tabs on your credit reports. Annoyingly Experian will never let me get my report online, for identity reasons (I apparently can't prove I'm me, haha).

 

Another vote for awardwallet.com, mint.com, and annualcreditreport.com. All easy to use, succinct, and help keep your life organized. Biggest objection I hear from others for awardwallet and mint is that you are giving one company your user/pass to multiple accounts. I personally have no problem with it and just accept that we live in a digital world which requires some faith in the safety of the system.

 

AwardWallet and manual system for credit cards. I copy and print the promotion, acceptance email and the document the card is attached to. I put the date I received the card, the date I activated and the person I talked to ( I always verify the signup bonus) and attach the first purchase receipt.

As far as the free credit reports and creditkarma, the information is incomplete for me. I monitor using Truecredit.com where I can track all three credit scores and the number of inquiries on each credit report. Once per month and I got them to drop the price to $9.95 per month.

 

Ditto on Awardwallet and CreditKarma for me. Both work very well for me. I love AwardWallet especially since I can see all my accounts all at once and check them all with a click.

I've tried to use Mint.com in the past to track all my bank accounts in one spot, but sadly it doesn't work with my local credit union. Anyone have any other Mint-like sites they like?

 

Am I the only one who doesn't use online tools but simply keeps everything in a spreadsheet? Perhaps I'm slowly drifting away from modern life

 

I'd suggest Yodlee, but I think Mint uses Yodlee's engine, so that might not work any better, unless Mint uses an older version or something.

Yodlee does have a forum where one can request new banks and such, so you might try doing that, then either switching to Yodlee or hoping that it trickles down to Mint (assuming Yodlee adds it, which I understand that they usually eventually do).

 

Thanks for the info. I'll look into them. The one downside of credit-card churning has been having accounts scattered across multiple banks. It gets a little time-consuming to stay on top of all of them after a while.

 

That's exactly why I started using Yodlee. Between my wife and me (I handle the finances), it became rather cumbersome to track multiple accounts. Even when I'm not using one, it helps to keep track of it in case a suspicious charge appears.

 

https://www.points.com/

https://gomiles.com/

 

Just learned about a new credit score monitoring site like Credit Karma, but using Experian rather than Transunion. I'm not going to sign up until it seems a little more established because I'm very cautious with my financial and personal information, but it has been recommended by Consumer Reports and CNN Money and the like.

 

Thanks for the tip about Credit Sesame. I just signed up for it. It pulls in all the credit cards from your credit report and the balances you have. It also pulls in your credit score from Experian. I looked through a bunch of sources before giving them my SSN. I figured, if I can give my SSN to Credit Karma, I can do the same thing with this website too. The good thing is that I now have FAKO scores from both Experian and TransUnion.

 

I wonder if an experienced churner might be able to share how much the pulls for diferent cards have affected their credit scores?

 

That would be one for Ingy.

Deploy the bat-signal . . . Ingy, you out there?

 

A few points per inquiry. I still have a great credit score. Wouldn't recommend doing too much churning if you are buying a house soon though. Gleff talks more about the effects of churning on your score in this thread.

 

wanderlust:
Great tip! I haven't heard of credit sesame before this post. While credit karma is great, almost 100% of my pulls tend to come out of experian. After some googling I felt comfortable signing up. It was a breeze and it provides very valuable info.

So now my arsenal is:
1) Credit Karma - Transunion and VantageScore
2) Credit Sesame - Experian
3) Award Wallet
4) Mint