Pocketmint

Tag: credit scores

1. Reader case study: short sales and debt

   9 April 2012

   After I posted What to do — and not do — with your former mortgage dollars, I received a request for advice on a strategic default from a woman I’ll call Tricia. I agreed to give her some (friendly, I-am-not-a-lawyer) suggestions based on my own research, and she gave me permission to share our exchange […]

2. Credit cards (part two): use ’em or lose ’em

   17 July 2009

   As I mentioned in part one, for the last two years Jak and I have been using a single credit-card account, a Costco Amex card with cash-back rewards, for all our credit-card needs. (When a merchant doesn’t take American Express, we use the debit MasterCard for our joint checking account.) This makes record-keeping easy. At […]

3. Credit cards (part one): the game is changing

   12 July 2009

   I’ve just about had it with credit cards. Like most people of my generation, I got my first card in college. Then, and for the next twenty years, getting credit was deceptively easy. I used it in all the typical foolish ways: to pay bills during periods of unemployment, to finance an unsustainable small business, […]

4. Score! Lawsuit results in free credit reports

   25 June 2008

   In the 1990s credit reporting company TransUnion thought it had a great way to make more money. By filtering its already enormous database of credit information on U.S. consumers, it could sell highly targeted mailing lists to marketers. Just one little problem, though: the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which allows the use of such data […]