Credit Karma

What Is Credit Karma?

Credit Karma is a free financial platform owned by Intuit (the company behind TurboTax and QuickBooks). It gives you access to your credit scores from TransUnion and Equifax, updated weekly, along with credit monitoring, a credit score simulator, and personalized recommendations for financial products.

The app makes money by recommending credit cards, loans, and insurance products. When you apply for a product through Credit Karma, they earn a referral fee from the lender or provider. That’s how they keep everything free for you.

Credit Karma is not a debt payoff tool. It doesn’t track your balances, build payoff schedules, or compare strategies like snowball vs. avalanche. But it does something useful that dedicated debt apps often don’t: it shows you how your debt payoff journey is affecting your credit score in real time.

How Credit Karma Helps with Debt Payoff

Tracking your credit score progress. One of the most motivating parts of paying off debt is watching your credit score climb. As you reduce your credit card balances, your credit utilization ratio drops, and your score typically improves. Credit Karma lets you see this happening week by week. That kind of visible progress can keep you going when the payoff process feels slow.

The credit score simulator. This is Credit Karma’s most useful tool for people paying off debt. You can model scenarios like “What happens to my score if I pay off this $3,000 credit card?” or “What if I open a personal loan to consolidate my debt?” The simulator gives you an estimate — not an exact prediction — but it helps you understand how different moves might affect your credit.

Monitoring for problems. Credit monitoring alerts you when something changes on your credit report: a new account, a hard inquiry, a missed payment. If you’re focused on debt payoff, you want to know immediately if something unexpected shows up.

Seeing the full picture. Credit Karma pulls in all your accounts from TransUnion and Equifax, so you can see your total debt load, account statuses, and payment history in one place.

Limitations for Debt Payoff

Credit Karma is great at what it does, but you should understand what it doesn’t do:

No payoff planning. There’s no way to enter your debts and get a snowball or avalanche schedule. Credit Karma shows you where you stand, not how to get out of debt.

Recommendation bias. The product recommendations are advertising. Credit Karma might suggest you open a new balance transfer card or take out a personal loan — and those might be good moves. But the recommendations are influenced by which companies pay Credit Karma referral fees. Always compare options independently before applying.

Only two bureaus. Credit Karma shows TransUnion and Equifax scores but not Experian. Your Experian score could be different, especially if you have accounts that report to only one or two bureaus.

Temptation to apply for new credit. When you’re trying to pay off debt, the last thing you need is a screen full of “You’re pre-approved!” offers for new credit cards. Credit Karma’s business model puts these front and center. It takes discipline to use the monitoring features without getting pulled into new applications.

Our Take

Credit Karma is a genuinely useful free tool — just not for the reason you might expect. It’s not going to build your debt payoff plan. For that, you need a dedicated debt tracker.

Where Credit Karma shines is as a companion app. Use it alongside your debt payoff tool of choice to monitor your credit score, watch your utilization drop, and make sure nothing unexpected pops up on your report. The score simulator is also valuable when you’re weighing consolidation options.

Just be mindful of the product recommendations. They’re there to make Credit Karma money, not necessarily to help you get out of debt faster. Use the monitoring features and ignore the ads unless you’ve independently confirmed a product makes sense for your situation.