I have two Washington Mutual credit cards. Since Chase bought out WaMu last year, I've been receiving mail and e-mail messages about the conversion of WaMu credit card accounts to Chase credit card accounts.

One of the best features of WaMu credit cards is that they allow you to view your monthly updated FICO credit score as reported by TransUnion for free. Unfortunately, according to an e-mail I got from WaMu this morning, this freebie is soon going the way of the mastadon. Here's the relevant text of the e-mail.

I've been making use of a 30-day free trial of TransUnion's TrueCredit 3-credit-report monitoring service. Each day (almost) I've been pulling a new report and see updated FAKO credit scores. I even used it to help get two baddies removed from all three of my reports.

Yesterday I mentioned that I got a 30-day late payment removed from my TransUnion and Experian credit reports. Today, Equifax capitulated and removed it as well.

Which means my credit reports are now all clean – yea!

I'm tired. I'm going to bed.

Two Christmases ago, my wife went a little crazy with a Chase Disney credit card we had. I didn't realize at the time that there was a balance on it, so I missed two payments and got a 30-day late notice attached to reports at all three primary credit reporting agencies (CRAs).

Once I realized that the payment was late I had paid the balance off completely and then canceled the card. In retrospect, I probably didn't need to cancel it, but at the time it was easier than keeping it around.

Here are a few recent personal experiences related to credit. Just the facts.

Round-robin reporting