It’s Called Currency

This one is for folks who have a real problem with impulse control. You know who you are, even if you won’t admit it out loud to anyone else. You’ve got credit card balances that are beyond your ability to keep up with the minimum monthly payments, or they’re rapidly approaching it. You believe that any available credit on your card(s) is as good as cash and you’ve just got to spend it. (If you pay off your credit cards each month, never carrying a balance on them, feel free to disregard this post, or keep reading if you think there’s someone else that this may help.) [Read more →]

Tags: credit, Thursday Task by Julie Ann Dunn
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Our current social environment has conditioned us to believe that credit cards are necessary, that we have to have them in order to live our every day lives. We are a nation that thinks that living beyond our means is normal and that savings accounts are old fashioned. Credit cards are commonplace, but what we know about the business of consumer credit is woefully little. [Read more →]

Tags: credit, education by Julie Ann Dunn
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You’ve heard all about the ever-important credit score, right? You’ve got to have a good one if you’re looking to buy a house or get a car loan with a reasonable interest rate—or even get approved for the loan in the first place. A recent development is that a bad credit score can even keep you from getting good insurance rates or some jobs. But what, really, is your credit score? How do they come up with that number and what’s actually a “good” number to have? [Read more →]

Tags: credit, credit reports, education by Julie Ann Dunn
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Back in 2006, the mega-retailer Wal-Mart abolished their layaway program, prompting many to claim the death knell had rung for that type of buy-on-time purchase. Two years later, layaway is looking pretty good, especially to K-Mart which has a new ad campaign promoting their program. Don’t look to Wal-Mart to jump back on this bandwagon; they won’t.

Why would retailers kill layaway? [Read more →]

Tags: credit, spending less by Julie Ann Dunn
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It may be Halloween, but if you haven’t been saving money for your holiday season purchases, you’re really going to be in for a scare. The current economy has made planning and preparing before the “big day” oh so much more crucial.

I’m always amazed when I meet people who somehow manage to forget for the first ten months of the year that there’s this big expensive event coming in December. [Read more →]

Tags: budgeting, credit, spending less by Julie Ann Dunn
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I wish I could think of myself as a “homeowner”. That’s the label that supposedly fits, but the truth is that the bank that loaned us the money is who owns our house. One day, we will have paid off the loan and will truly own our home. And with some good money management, that day is drawing closer every month.

[Read more →]

Tags: credit, mortgages, spending less by Julie Ann Dunn
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Don’t let those cute and catchy commercials trick you into paying for your credit reports when you can get them for free. By law, you can request a copy of your report from each of the three major credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion) once every twelve months.

There are three ways to request the reports: [Read more →]

Tags: credit, credit reports by Julie Ann Dunn
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In my “previous life” (read: first marriage and the subsequent divorce), I went down the road of lousy credit and all the stress that comes with it. I have since reformed my ways and now my credit is excellent. So now when someone asks me what I know about rebuilding credit, here’s what I tell them…

The best advice I’ve got on how to rebuild your credit is to
1. STOP DIGGING and learn to live within your means,
2. PAY OFF YOUR EXISTING DEBT and stop thinking you can borrow your way out of debt, and
3. CHANGE YOUR THINKING because credit does not equal money.

[Read more →]

Tags: budgeting, credit, debt snowball, marketing by Julie Ann Dunn
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