So, the stories are coming out about how consumers are having more difficulty getting loans. Credit cards for those of us with good scores, on the other hand? Personal experience says there’s credit a plenty.

I’ve received a steady stream of appealing 0 percent interest rate offer credit cards in the past week.

My favorite? The application for my WaMu Visa Platinum credit card, with it’s 0 percent APR on balance transfers until 2010, no annual fee, credit line of up to $30,000, and choice of 5 card colors!

WaMu SVP T. Carroll  requests that I respond before Nov. 5th, 2008 (Snarky Kara figures she or he might not be employed there after that date…so time is of the essence!).

No wonder us “Main streeters” have had a hard time swallowing all this talk about how bad the credit crunch is and digesting what it means to us.

I’ve no doubt that it exists, but in my household, the credit crunch refers to all of these card applications taking a trip through the shredder and being stuffed in the recycling bin.

For most of us, this is one of the scariest financial times in our lifetimes. And one of the reasons we’re in trouble is that healthy financial institutions are hoarding nuts for the long winter instead of sharing the wealth.

As a consumer, I’m doing the same. I am being extremely careful about how I spend, which means I’m saving more. I doubt I’m the only one.

It makes me wonder. Is America, the nation of spenders simply in hibernation and we’ll come out hungry for deals when this financial thing shakes out? Or are we going to come out of this mess fundamentally changed?

Every time I mention our right to receive three free credit reports per year through www.annualcreditreport.com (one from each major credit bureau), I get a handful of readers contacting me about where to get their free credit score.

The score, after all, is what lenders use to determine your loan interest rate, or if you get a loan period. It’s also used for a host of other reasons I won’t get into here.

The score is based on data found on your credit report, which is why it’s important to make sure there are no mistakes. But I’m with consumers who wish they could get a free score.

Of course, the bureaus and Fair Isaac, the Minneapolis-based company whose FICO score is widely used, know that we will pay for our score. So why would they give it away?

A new site just came to my attention that does give you a score for free. Credit Karma offers a free score that is based on the same 300 to 850 range developed by Fair Isaac. In fact, Credit Karma pulls your score from one of the three bureaus you’d use to buy your score.

But the score you buy may not be the score your lender uses. Each bureau has its own credit score that may differ slightly from the one your lender uses or Credit Karma pulls, so ask if you’re worried about your score being on the margin.

AAAARRGGGGGHHHH! That’s for all of you frustrated credit consumers out there. Can they make this stuff any more complex?

My Credit Karma score, a 788, jives with the score I pulled from Fair Isaac earlier this year.

Two mentions about the site:

1. I had trouble getting the site to load properly with Firefox (I have an older version).

2. The site will ask you for your social security number, address, birthday, and phone number– info it will use to pull your score. But you may not be comfortable with that.

For the merely curious, type “credit score simulator” into Google and you should get a site or two that will estimate your score without needing that sensitive data.

What’s in it for Credit Karma? They try to entice you to click on offers for credit cards and other services that are tailored to your credit score status.

Happy scoring!

My column this weekend was on credit card reform.

Today, CreditCards.com released its Second Annual Taking Charge survey that addressed some of what I did on Sunday. It found (surprise, surprise) 73 percent of Americans desire stricter oversight of the credit card industry; 58 percent of Americans also expressed a growing distrust of credit card companies.

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It’s no secret that I’m a gal with a lot of credit cards. I’ve opened them up over the years to take advantage of various credit card offer. I use the trio with the best rewards and the others gather dust.

In the past year, we’ve had a 0 percent offer on purchases on a particular card. We’ve carried a balance of anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousands dollars on that card and always had close to that amount racking up interest in a high-yield online savings account. Then when the balance got too big for my liking, I paid it down with the money in the savings account.

In recent weeks, I’ve been mulling over a particular credit card deal that came to my husband offering him 15 months of 0 percent interest not only on purchases but also on a balance transfer sans fee. That’s rare. We could finally buy that flat-screen TV we’ve been wanting and discussing for much too long (sometimes indulging in a want is probably worth it just to stop the constant discussion of whether or not you should give in). I could also buy last minute tickets to my cousin’s wedding (check out the NWA Last Minute Packages and Lastminute.com). Then we’d pay off the purchases over the next year.

It sounds smart– leveraging someone else’s money and profiting from it until reckoning day. But the problem is it encourages spending that I’m not sure we’d indulge in if it weren’t for the credit card deal.

How about you? Do you take advantage of 0 percent credit offers to buy things you’d otherwise have to wait to buy, to leverage the credit limit to earn interest, or to act as a safety net?