The Sun's Financial Diary

According to an article on MSN Money published today, Fair Isaac, the creator of the popular FICO credit score, will adjust the way it calculate a person’s credit worthiness to better reflect “who’s a good risk and who’s a bad one” at the time when people intend to have, and use, more credit cards than [...]

The terms “hard pull” and “soft pull” or “hard credit check” and “soft credit check” often pop up when people talk about credit report, credit history, or credit inquiries. So what exactly are they and how do they affect credit scores? What Are Hard Pull and Soft Pull? “Hard pull” usually refers to credit inquiries [...]

May 1st was the one of the three times in a year that we request a free credit report from one of the three credit agencies. We have been doing this, getting a free credit report every four months, for several years and it had worked out quite well for us. All I need to [...]

I received this email notice this morning about the class action settlement for cases Hillis v. Equifax Consumer Services, Inc. and Fair Isaac Corp., Case No. 1:04-CV-3400 (USDC, ND GA) and Slack v. Fair Isaac Corp. and MyFICO Consumer Services, Inc., Case No. 1:07-CV-314 (USDC, ND GA): You may be eligible to receive a benefit [...]

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday released its annual report on top consumer complaints for 2006. The report found that for the seventh year in a row, “identity theft tops the list, accounting for 36 percent of the 674,354 complaints received between January 1 and December 31, 2006.” And consumers paid heavy price for fraud related losses. [...]

For the past several years, we have been getting a copy of free credit report every 4 months (as NJ residents, we were eligible for a free report every year well before the law mandated a free credit report from all three credit agencies for everybody every 12 months). The last time I ordered a [...]

Last night when I logged into my Paypal account to do some transfers, I noticed this new service before I went to my account page:   Since I have accessed my Paypal account for a while, I don’t know exactly when this new service is available. But this does sound a good service if it’s [...]

With the amendment to the federal Fair Credit Reporting, getting a free credit report has never been easier. Now everybody is eligible for one free credit report from each of the three credit agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) every 12 months (has to be exactly 365 days, not even one day earlier, or you will [...]