from MintLife Personal Finance News & Advice
Now that the CARD Act has been around for over a year and fully digested by the credit industry, it’s time to take inventory on some of its successes and failures — and bust a few myths.
from MintLife Personal Finance News & Advice
The Fair Credit Reporting Act says that the credit reporting agencies may furnish reports to any company that intends to use that information for the purpose of underwriting insurance. The real question is, why do they do it?
from MintLife Personal Finance News & Advice
What’s the difference between a credit report and a credit file? Is there a difference between a credit score and a FICO score? And what’s a consumer-reporting agency? Is that the same as a credit-reporting agency? Here are seven pairs of seemingly interchangeable credit terms that [...]
from MintLife Personal Finance News & Advice
It looks like credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, collections and bankruptcies will soon have to share the credit report stage with apartment rental accounts. At least they will have to do so at Experian (EXPN). The credit reporting agency recently announced that they added millions of apartment rental [...]
from MintLife Personal Finance News & Advice
Since the beginning of 2004 Americans have had the right to claim their credit reports from each of the credit reporting agencies once every twelve months, for free. But since then, only 4.16% of the free credit reports available have been claimed. That meager percentage is dreadful considering [...]
from MintLife Personal Finance News & Advice
“Statute of limitations” refers to the amount of time that can pass after some sort of event before legal actions regarding that event can no longer be initiated. After the statue of limitations has expired that debt becomes a “time barred debt,” meaning the lender’s ability to sue you [...]
from MintLife Personal Finance News & Advice
Credit reports are generally broken down into five to seven areas, depending on what credit report you’re looking at and whether it’s a “consumer” version or a “users” version. Here’s are the sections and what you’re likely to find in each. . [...]
from MintLife Personal Finance News & Advice
Correcting errors in your credit reports seems like an easy task. You get copies of your reports, you review them for accuracy and if you find something wrong, you file disputes with the credit bureaus to have the errors corrected. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as I just [...]
from MintLife Personal Finance News & Advice
We all know what the credit reporting agencies will allow consumers to do. They’ll let you either purchase your credit reports or claim freebies periodically because of state and Federal law. They’ll let you place fraud alerts on your files if you feel like you may have [...]
from MintLife Personal Finance News & Advice
Equifax, TransUnion and Experian…we all know these guys. I’ve written about them about a thousand times over the past decade. We credit types tend to focus on these guys for obvious reasons. What you may not know is that these are not the only companies that are [...]