You are your credit score – STLtoday.com
By Jim Gallagher
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
05/03/2009You probably think of yourself as a human being. What a quaint idea in this digital age. To American business, you are a number. You are your credit score.
Apply for a loan, and the bank will check your score. Increasingly, employers will check it if you apply for a job. I recently applied for auto insurance, and the insurance company checked my credit score.
If your merit on this earth is to be measured in three digits, you want the highest digits possible. So lets look at ways to goose your score upward.
The grand gurus of credit scoring work at FICO, also known as the Fair Isaac Corp. of Minneapolis. FICO is filled with wonky people studying borrowers who default on loans.
By reading the credit entrails of the down-on-their-luck, the FICO gurus conjure a statistical portrait of people likely to default on loans. The closer you fit that picture, the lower your credit score.
Those cursed by FICO find themselves charged higher rates for mortgages, car loans and credit cards, or denied credit altogether. With banks raising their lending standards, a good credit score is becoming more important.
FICO scores run from 300 to 850. The median score is 713, meaning half the population is above and half below.
Scores are based on data in your credit report. So, step one is to make sure your credit report is accurate. You can get a free report once a year at annualcreditreport.com, along with ways to fix mistakes.
read full article here… 05/03/2009 – You are your credit score – STLtoday.com.
