JoeTaxpayer

I’ve gone on in many posts about the subprime mess. Pages and pages along with multiple links. But Randy Glasbergen managed to summarize in one insightful cartoon the source of our crisis;

Note: The above is from “Today’s Cartoon by Randy Glasbergen”, displayed with special permission. For many more cartoons, please visit Randy’s site at www.glasbergen.com
While there, you are invited to support his site by visiting his Cartoon Gift Shop at http://www.cafeshops.com/glasbergen for mugs, t-shirts, calendars, framed prints and other fun products featuring cartoons from his website. Me, I have a day job, and rely on the kindness of professional cartoonists to provide my Saturday material.

Joe

written by JOE \\ tags: calendars, cartoon, lend, mma, mugs, prints, professional cartoonists, randy glasbergen, Subprime

Last September I wrote about a zero interest credit card offer I took advantage of. I took the money and bought a CD, pocketing $1000 interest in 6 months time. I received a few comments and questions, centering around how this would impact my credit score. I offered a chart showing how the score is impacted, in general, but couldn’t say for sure the precise impact of any one action on the score. That would take regular access to the score itself, which through MyFICO, would cost nearly $50/yr. Now, I discovered a free way to have regular access. It seems that WAMU (Washington Mutual) offers such access to their credit card holders. The card has no annual fee, and you just click through a link to see your score. They offer an option to get email notification if your score moves by more than 20 points. Combine this with a regular request for your full credit report, and you have a good plan to monitor your credit health

Joe

written by JOE \\ tags: annualcreditreport.com, Credit, credit cards, credit report, Equifax, equity line, Experian, Finance, lend, loan, Suze Orman, TransUnion

You can go to annualcreditreport.com and request to view your credit report from each of the three nationwide consumer credit reporting companies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Since each one permits you you view your report annually, you are able to view a different one every four months. I’ve not seen the value in paying for ‘credit protection’ since your credit cards’ liability limits you to $50 so long as you repost a card stolen soon after you are aware it’s missing. Even those protection services cannot save you the time it will take to get your life in order if you are the victim of true identity theft.
JOE

written by JOE \\ tags: annualcreditreport.com, Credit, Equifax, Experian, fico, identity theft, lend, loan, TransUnion