The Consumer’s Corner

This is a value driven website (or blog, whichever you prefer), and as you’ve seen most of what we write consists of product reviews. But I want the The Consumer’s Corner to be more than that; I have three goals. I want to help individuals make more money, save more money, and get the most value possible from every single cent of that money. We’ve been leaning very hard on the ‘value part’ (product reviews), and that will continue to be our largest focus. But I want to offer other advice and information, especially to my young readers, that addresses the other issues that I mentioned.

In an age where transaction occur blindly, issues of identity theft and credit fraud should be on your mind at all times. The idea of identity theft has been harped about so much recently, it’s almost to the point that it’s being ‘glossed’ over. You hear something so many times, you will eventually stop paying attention. You simply cannot allow this to happen; making that mistake could cause (at best) a year or two’s worth of headaches, or (at worst) cripple you financially for decades. As you get older, your credit rating will affect everything from your ability to get a simple credit card with a decent interest rate, all the way to your ability to secure housing for yourself.

‘I’m young, I don’t even have any credit to worry about.’ If you have a social security number, you have credit of some type, or at least the ability for someone else to take out credit on your behalf. Upon running my first credit report check, I was amazed to find accounts open that I was clueless about, and an alternate address of ‘mine’ that I’ve never lived in. What are these? Who bought what? It very well may have been something I purchased myself, but it may not. Either way, it’s nice to know the information is available to me, so I can attempt to resolve it, and get those negative marks off of my report. The extra address may indicate an attempted case of identity theft; I recognize the address as the residence of a very untrustworthy person that I unfortunately happen to be related to. Always be super protective of your social security number; those nine digits are the key to it all.

‘How can I retrieve this information?’ There are three big credit reporting agencies; Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. Each of the credit agencies are required (by United States law) to freely give you one credit report every year, upon your request. You’re not required to request all the reports at the same time, so if you space them out, you can keep a fairly keen eye on your status with absolutely no charge to you at all. I’ll give you the official government link at the end of the article. Should you start running into issues, you may choose to hire a service to monitor your credit for you (for a fee), but this certainly will not be necessary for everyone. I cannot at this time refer you to a specific agency should you encounter problems; it’d be best to seek the help of a professional financial adviser.

‘My report is clean, but I do not have any credit, and I’d like to build some. What do I do?’ The answer is simple, but requires a lot of self discipline (discipline is essential when it comes to all things credit). Get a credit card. Use that credit card. Pay off that credit card. Every single month. At first, it might be difficult to acquire a line of credit, I was turned down three times, but someone will eventually say ‘Yes.’ I will recommend a company here; Capital One has a card specifically tailored to help people either establish new credit, or reverse bad credit. They were the ones who gave me my first approval, and I think we’ve been happy with each other since. So long as you use the card ($30-$50 a month should work), and pay it on time (every time!) your credit score will start to rise, and new opportunities will present themselves. In fact, they upped my credit line by one third this month, because I’ve been responsible with my account.

Set a budget, and make sure that budget includes a certain percentage for “I’m not touching this money until I retire” savings. That budget has to be in line with your income. If it’s not, you have to reassess and trim some fat, or find new avenues of income generation. Use your credit, but don’t abuse your credit. That will at least get you started on the path towards a bright financial future.

I hope these tips will be able to help some of you. The world is big, it’s complicated, and it sucks. Use opportunities like this to learn from other’s successes and failures; there is no more efficient way to get ahead in life. I encourage (beg?) financial/credit bloggers to leave links in the comment section of this post, so my readers will be able to get more accurate and detailed advice, should they seek it. Have a good one, Consumers!

Annual Credit Report dot com

–Jeremy Hobbs

finance, credit, indentity theft, consumers, credit report

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Advice, My Best Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.