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One of the challenges that comes with youth is the process of building a credit reportworthy of solid credit scores. There are a variety of ways to build a credit report. Someare smart, and some are not so smart. One common myth about building credit is that ifyou can add yourself to a parent’s mortgage […]

Today The Policy and Economic Research Council (PERC) released the findings ofa study that concluded that 95% of study participants are “satisfied” with the resultsof their credit bureau dispute investigation process and that less than 1% of credit,collections and public records were disputed. Further, they concluded that while 20% ofthe study participant’s credit reports were

Your credit report is a fluid, ever changing record of your financial obligations. It’supdated possibly dozens of times each month, at different times. In fact, every activeaccount that you have, regardless of whether or not there’s a balance, is likely updatedon your credit file at different times once every 30 days. Add to that the

Credit card utilization, aka “revolving utilization”, is one of the most predictive, andtherefore valuable, measurements in the FICO credit scoring system. In fact, it’s a majorcomponent of FICO’s “Debt Usage” category of characteristics, which is worth 30% ofthe points in your FICO score. The higher your utilization, the ratio of balances to creditlimits, the lower

The short answer is, never. The longer, and better, answer is that in general it’s not agood idea to close credit cards except for under a few circumstances. Closing creditcards can cause your credit scores to go down because you lose the value of theunused credit limits, which are important to your scores. The circumstances

I’ve written enough articles about what makes your scores go down to choke a shredder.It’s about time for one about how those scores are actually built. Rather than getting tootechnical, I’ll keep it simple. Credit scoring systems are not random and are not influenced by “common sense.”They are built using statistical methods such as Logistic

Until the beginning of 2011 very few people had ever heard or used the phrase “adverseapproval.” The words just don’t seem to pair well. How can an approval be adverse?The new risk based pricing rules changed all of that and now the two words go togetheras well as “credit” and “card.” An adverse approval occurs

This might have been the question of the year in both 2009 and 2010. Prior to 2009nobody outside the mortgage industry had ever heard of a short sale. But with themortgage crisis still in full swing, everyone has heard the term. A short sale occurs when your mortgage lender agrees to accept less than you

One of the great myths of credit scoring is that closing unused credit card accounts willhelp to improve your scores. The assumption is that having too many unused creditcards hurts your credit scores. And, while that might make common sense, the oppositeis actually what’s true. Having many unused credit cards actually helps your scoresquite a