Your life style can hurt your credit!!!
Filed under: Banks, Credit, FICO, Interest Rates, Spending, Wal-Mart
According to an article on Money central, the credit card companies are using all kinds of info that they’ve collected about you to lower your credit limit and since lower limits mean higher utilization and lower credit scores, where you shop can lower your credit score. There’s several other factors that they use that should anger business owners, state officials and every person who uses credit. Here’s a few
What you buy
Where you shop
If people who were victims of the subprime loan mess happen to shop there
If you live in a state hit hard by foreclosures, such as Florida, Nevada and California
Would these last 2 mean that shopping at Wal-Mart in Florida, Nevada or California would lower your credit limit since they are the largest retail store and most likely subprime borrowers shop there?
The full article is here. Can your lifestyle hurt your credit?
I’m not laughing
Filed under: Banks, Credit, FICO, Finance, Interest Rates, Politics
There’s dozens or hundreds of stories about the bail out package in the news and it seems like you can’t open the paper, turn on the news or surf the web without reading about it. This blog wasn’t started to cover this type of stories, it was started to rant and go nuts over so called experts who give vague, generic advice to unsuspecting people who believe they are looking out for the public.
However, since I started Financial Comedy the whole system went down the tubes and I’ve been scrambling to keep up.
The thing that comes to mind for me is why not reset every man and woman’s credit score to perfect so that everyone who has been screwed by the banking and credit system get’s a mulligan or a do over? The system has become so complicated that we need help managing our scores and although I haven’t read the new plan, the old plan would actually lower your score if you tried to pay an old collection account. You can also have rates raised if you were late on an unrelated bill. For example, your credit card could raise your rates if you were late on the electric bill regardless of if you were ever late on a credit card payment.
On top of how confusing the rules were, you couldn’t get the most important number in your credit life, your score without paying or joining a monitoring service and there were 3 different companies with 3 different scoring systems all of which were private.
Ok enough about this. I’m probably going to go back to my original plan and only touch on the bail out insanity from time to time but in the mean time, here’s a couple of stories I found interesting.
Senate Democrats promise to change stimulus bill
Why the bank bailouts are doomed
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; I’m not blaming Democrats or Republicans, actually I’m blaming them both. They both are to blame and I don’t know which party is more at fault. I am optimistic that President Obama has good ideas and can improve the situation and hope that I’m proven correct.
Feeling Paranoid Yet?
Filed under: Credit, FICO, Rant, Spending, Statistics, Uncategorized
When I read this article on MSN, I felt sick, then angry and then decided to share it with everyone.
The idea that we are so analyzed that everything we buy can be used in such a manner is upsetting.
Have you ever went to the store to pick up a few things and got to the checkout and realized that it’s a strange combination? For example, electrical tape to fix that wire, hand lotion because your hands are cracked, those little potting tools, a feather duster and cat food? Well instead of just freaking out the cashier with this very unusual combination, it has the potential to affect your credit score if you forgot to bring cash. Did the shopping visual make you laugh or just disturb you?
This may sound like a paranoid rant but considering that most of the criteria these companies use are secret, we can’t be sure. I’d like to think I’m overreacting, but read the full article and judge for yourself. Personally I feel like Bob Seger was right in Feel Like A Number.
Credit limits being lowered and hurting credit scores
It’s amazing how I can get an e-mail from a friend and it leads to a blog post.
I ran across this story on CNN about credit limits hurting credit scores.
If there’s anyone who knows the importance of guarding your credit score, it’s me. But for an outside agency to be able to drop your score through no action of your own, seems unfair. So much for Fair Issac being fair.
This also shows that we need to keep our balance low and our limit high.
NAKED RETIREMENT
Naked Retirement strips down the old traditional models of retirement planning and replaces the it with a more creative and intuitive one that helps people take control of their retirement planning, saving, and investing.
The book details the evolution of retirement and uses it to help baby boomers and retirees understand why they are behind in saving and what they can do about it.
"Retirement planning can no longer be one-dimensional, focused exclusively on merely providing information such as how pensions or a 401(k)’s work. It needs to extend beyond financial planning to include aspects of health and social issues that will impact future retirees," according to author, Robert Laura.
Billed as the ultimate defense against the scary, anxious, and stressful feelings people get on their first day of retirement when they have only a financial plan full of numbers and charts to guide them, Laura simplifies the mental and emotional aspects of retirement planning with thought-provoking questions about your definition and approach to retirement as well as important retirement conversations that foster strong relationships in retirement.
The book culminates into a one-page Naked Retirement plan that will help people as well as planners successfully estimate retirement preparedness and future success.
Book is available at NakedRetirement.com and is emailed in pdf format directly to participants.