The holidays are coming to and end, are you getting nervous to check the mail box for the bills? Are you now quite sure on how much you spent, or how much over budget you went this year? Don’t worry there is light at the end of the tunnel, and we can all get though this with a plan.
Once you have a solid plan in place, the overwhelming feeling will start to go away, and you can rest more easily knowing you have a plan. You should also keep in mind that if you have gifts spread across many different cards, it will be worth your time to check out the interest rates on all your cards. You may have one card that is significantly lower than your others and you could save money by transferring off the balances of your high interest rate cards to you lower cards.
The next big step is planning for next year. Look at what your budget was for this year, and then take into account how much you went over your budget and come up with your actual holiday expense for the year. Knowing this number will help you better budget for next years season. Once you pay off this years debts, you can then start your holiday fund by trying to put away enough money to cover your holiday expenses completely without having to go into debt.
ShareWe see people from all walks of life who enroll in our services. It really is a broad spectrum of people from victims of ID theft, to a young adult who is curious about what there credits core may be. We also get people looking to improve their scores, or people who want to protect themselves from ID theft. Then there are people who are preparing to make a large purchase such as a home.
Victims of ID theft often are advised to enroll in our service so they can monitor their reports for a year or so to make sure that no new activity appears, and if it does they can take care of it immediately. Often times if your a victim of a ID crime the company who your data was stolen from will provide you with a limited monitoring program, but in some cases they wont, or you just want a more inclusive service.
We also have a fair amount of students who have no credit at all, and are wanting to start to build up a thick credit file. They will often enroll in the service as its a first step on the long road ahead of them. I used to think this was a bit of overkill as the chances of you having your identity stolen was low because you did not have credit cards, or other easily stolen financial information. That has changed over the years as your social security number is now used so commonly that any of the databases that store this information could have been compromised. In addition this demographic is big video game players, and to be honest so am I. And many of the online games are monthly subscriptions, and they require a debit or credit card to play. These databases are becoming common targets for hackers, and for this reason I now recommend it as a good practice to sing up for our service.
Then you have those people who are planning to make that large purchase. They want to know exactly what their credit looks like and exactly what they will need to do in order to get the best rate possible. By monitoring your score, can know when you get to the score that you want, and at that time you can start to shop around for the best rate, and make that purchase!
The same goes for people who want to improve their scores. You can use the tool provided with the service to know which factors are have the most effect on your score in a positive and negative manor. With this information it makes it that much easier to fix the large problems first, the ones that will have the most effect on your scores, and then start to take care of the smaller items.
I have been in this business for over ten years now, and I have never been able to see a clear pattern to the types of customers we get. Like I said we get people from all walks of life, and from every economic group.
ShareThe FACT act is short for the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions act. Its a mouthful, I know, but what does it mean, and why should you care about it? Good questions, and honestly its important and I wish more people knew about it and more importantly used it! In a nutshell the FACT act is the legislation that enables all US citizens free access to there credit reports once per year. It also put in some provisions to help prevent identity theft.
This legislation was passed in 2003, and still only a handful of people know about it and take advantage of it. There are a few very important sections of the FACT act here are the highlights. First is the creation of Annualcreditreport.com this is the site that was created to allow access to all three of your credit reports once per year. Consumers can log in and see their reports from Tansunion, Experian, and Equifax, what you do not get is your score. This is very helpful for those consumers who do not wish to sign up for a credit monitoring service or wish to monitor their credit using free tools available to them. Everyone should take advantage of this program!
The next important section of the bill is limiting printing of up to 5 digits of any customers card numbers on any point of sale purchases. Before this it was common to print out your entire card number along with the expiration date, which made it extremely easy to have unauthorized use of your cards. This one provision has cut down small transaction theft considerably. It is very comforting to know that we do not have hundreds if not thousands of receipts floating around with our complete card numbers on them!
The FACT act also made it possible that consumers can place fraud alerts, or military personal can place active duty alerts on there credit reports. What this does is that if you think you have been a victim of identity theft, or you are active duty being deployed overseas, you can request to have a fraud alert placed on your reports. These fraud alerts remain in place for 90 days, but you can request to extend them. What this does is make it much tougher for your identity to be stolen or used. If someone tries to open an account with your information the lender will see the alert and is required to make contact with you to verify that you are truly trying to apply for credit. If you are a current member of our credit monitoring service you can do this from within your account. If you are not a member, than you can do this by writing a letter to the credit bureaus explaining why you are the victim of identity theft, or you are active duty military and that you wish to have a fraud alert placed in your reports.
These are some of what I feel to be the most important parts of the FACT act for consumers. There are many more parts that are equally important, but we just do not have the space to cover in a short blog post. For a complete look go here. The FACT act is a very important piece of legislation that all consumers should be aware of, and take advantage of.
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According to this story over at Gizmodo hackers have been targeting Subway brand point of sale machines. There is a slight chance that if you have used your credit card at a Subway restaurant that you may have had your card number stolen. The hackers have managed to put 150 Subway locations at risk. They have gathered 80,000 people card information and managed to rack up over $3 million in fake charges!
This happened because these stores were not updating their point of sale machines according to the franchise suggested upgrade schedule. As a result the hackers were able to install code in the point of sale machines that logged the card information and then sent it to a FTP server. The thieves were blatant enough to print out there own credit cards with false names on them!
What is so scary about this kind of attack is that it is virtually undetectable by you or me. We are so used to paying with our cards that we never think our data could be stolen so easily. Keep in mind that this is extremely rare! So while it may be better to use cash in these small amounts, I would not really worry to much if I had to use my card.
In this case it does not appear these thieves were after you ID, and they did not seem to be trying to open new accounts in your name, so even being signed up with our credit monitoring service would not be able to protect you! So what can you do? Well not much unfortunately, you just have to make sure to keep an eye on your statements every month and look for unauthorized charges that you do not recognize.
What should you do if you find an unauthorized charge? You should contact the bank as soon as possible. In addition to calling you will want to write a letter documenting all the charges that you do not agree with. The bank or card issuer will then open an investigation to the charges, and will look at certain factors such as:
They will often request a written statement from you, and depending on the dollar amount they may ask you for a police statement. Card companies are very good at detecting fraud, and they will do everything they can to make the situation as easy as possible!
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We spend much of our time on this blog discussing ways that our credit report monitoring program can help protect your online identity. Our service is a great way to do that, but we need to also make sure that what we are doing offline is also working to keep our ID’s safe. Offline ID theft is a very common problem, and while it does no pose as large as a threat as your data being stolen online, it is still a risk, and one that can easily be reduced. The reason why online occurrences are more common is just the nature of the way data is stored. Most databases online store all your personal information in one place, its a one stop shop for a ID thieve. Offline it is a bit more work for a potential thief to put together all the pieces in order to steal your identity.
We went over a few tips early this week, (read the post here) but I want to dig in a bit deeper and provide some tips for securing your offline life.
1. Do not carry around an excessive amount of credit cards in your wallet. First it would be easy to lose one and not notice. Second if your wallet does get stolen (read here on how to handle that) having a ton of credit cards is going to slow down your process of getting them canceled and changed.
2. Do not carry your social security card in your wallet unless you need it for a particular reason. I know many of us have been in the habit of carrying our SSN cards around, but really it is so much safer to just keep it at home locked up than in our wallets.
3. Consider installing a locking mailbox. Your mail is a very easy place for a thief to get a hold of a treasure trove of personal information. Another great way to keep your mail safe is to use a PO box.
4. Shred anything with personal information on it, bank statements, credit card statements, cell phone bills, doctors or insurance bills, anything that has your personal information on it! The trash is one of the most common spots to have your identity stolen. If you have cats, you can toss the shredded documents in with your cat litter, and I can almost grantee nobody will be going through your shredded papers!
5. When using an ATM be careful to make sure nobody is near by and watching for your pin numbers. Also use a pin number that is just a random assortment of numbers. Thieves are very good at guessing or finding out pin numbers that our closely related to you, such as your birthday or anniversary.
With a few simple tips you should be able to eliminate the most common ways that your ID can be stolen offline.
ShareWe get a few calls every month about people who just want to order credit reports and not enroll in a credit monitoring service. On our site we do not provide this services as you can go to Annual Credit Report.com to get a free copy of all three of your credit reports. This is a great way to take a look at your credit report for free, and you are eligible to check you reports once per year. Is there a down side? Not really, I would say the only major downside is you do not get your credit scores, but if you are just wanting your reports to verify all the information on them, this is by far the best way to go about it.
What about all those ads you see on TV for free credit reports? You should not be seeing them anymore, there was a lawsuit brought against companies providing free credit reports, because like most things in life they were not free. In order to get your free reports, they enrolled you into a credit monitoring service. And then you will billed every month until you canceled. This brought about a lot of unhappy customers as it rightfully should! Around a year ago there was a large crack down on any site promoting these free offers, and they are not allowed to promote free credit reports anymore. If you do happen to come across one of these offers, I would stay away from it!
You can also purchase a 3 in 1 credit report from most of the bureaus websites. Just make sure when you are there you are not enrolling in a monitoring program to get them! The going rate as of today is about $30.00 for all three reports and scores, so if they are trying to charge you between $10 and $20 you are most likely being enrolled in a monitoring program.
So you might be thinking this is an odd post on a company that is promoting credit monitoring, well yes it is! Our goal though is to have 100% customer satisfaction and if you are looking for just your personal credit report and do not want to have credit monitoring, we want to make sure you get exactly what you need, and most important to make sure you are not signing up for something that you do not need or want.
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There are just times in our lives when we just can not afford to sign up for a credit monitoring service, we understand this very well. So what can you do to keep your identity safe?
The first thing I would recommend doing is head over to Annual Credit Report.com and order a copay of your credit reports. You can order your credit reports for free once every 12 months from this site. Annual Credit Report.com was made possible by the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, which made it possible for consumers to get a credit report from all three bureaus once per year.
Once you have all three credit reports, take a good look at them and find anything that is inaccurate or suspicious. For inaccurate information write a letter to each of the three credit bureaus and explain to them that the information provided on your credit report in wrong and you would like to have it removed. They are obligated by law to research the items in question and have them removed.
If you find something that looks suspicious you will want to contact the company that is reporting the suspicious activity. For example there may be a credit card account that you have no record of. You will want to contact the card provider, and find out when it was opened, and by who. If it was not you, you will want to have it removed and ask them to provide you a letter saying the account is closed, and that you were not the one who opened it. Once you get the letter from the card issuers you will once again want to contact all three bureaus and have this account completely wiped from your credit history.
Next thing you will want to do is to make sure you are very diligent about destroying any pieces of paper that contain your personal data such as your social security number, address, and home phone number! These pieces of information could be used to open account up in your name.
You will also want to protect your online identity. Make sure to change your passwords at least once per month. Make sure to use a strong password, one that contains both upper and lower case letters, and one that uses numbers.
In addition to your free credit reports from Annual Credit Report.com I highly recommend you purchase your credit reports at least once per quarter, that way you can have a much better chance of spotting identity theft, and taking the steps any thefts before they become a huge mess and consume much of your precious time and resources fighting.
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This is one of those life lessons that is easier said than done. There are not any of us who will not have financial curve balls thrown at us in our lives. We will all handle these problems differently and there is not one of us out there who can take these on flawlessly. We are also not meant to be able to solve our problems instantly, we are also not robots who can face adversity without any kind of emotional reactions. We get mad, hurt, upset, and sad. Your human, just like everyone else. Just like in every aspect of our lives, this is what life is, facing problems and challenges. We learn from them, we adapt to the situations that are thrown at us, we find solutions to the problems at hand, and ultimately we deal with the adversity that is put in front of us.
When a financial hardship hits, the one thing we can control is how we deal with the problem. There will be times in our lives when we just will not be able to make payments on time or meet other financial obligations. And its normal to want to avoid dealing with it, as it may seem hopeless at the time. I have been there, and I know how demoralizing it can be to have creditors calling up and demanding to be paid, and you just do not have the means to do it. I know how easy it can be to just ignore the calls and the letters, and hope the problem will go away. If only it was that easy. They will not go away, and likely the calls and letters will increase, and you will encounter penalty s and interest.
“The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.”
Brendan Francis
I know what you are thinking, well I would love to solve it, I just can not do that right now.
“When you can’t solve the problem, manage it.”
Robert Schuller
Face your problems head on. Manage them. The best thing you can when you get into a situation that you are sinking financially, is to reach out to your creditors. Make a list of all the debts you have and what the minimum payments are. Then take a hard look at where you are sitting with your finances and make a budget you can stick to. At that point its time to call each and everyone of them and be completely honest of where you sit, and how you plan to deal with the problems. Most if not all your creditors will be thankful you reached out to them, and most will be willing to work with for a period of time until you can get back on your feet and begin to make regular payments on time.
When talking to your creditors ask for a reduced payment and reduced interest rates. You may not be able to do this with the first person you speak to, I know it will be frustrating, but try to stay as calm and polite as you can. If you do not get a response from this level of agent, as to speak with a manager, and do not be afraid to ask to speak to the next persons manager and so and so on.
If you are at the point of receiving collection calls you the same advice as above. Explain to them your situation and that you would like to work with them to be able to bring your accounts into good standing. If these collections people are harassing you, or yelling at you, or doing anything that is not a polite and business like conversation hang up on them! You do not get to be treated like that even if you are behind on your bills, you do not have to take this kind of treatment.
Once you get back on your feet, it will be important to check your credit reports for errors that may have been reported. You could also enroll in our credit monitoring to track your credit scores, and to monitor your credit reports.
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One of the most common questions we get is people concerned with their credit scores, and how they can go about improving them. Here is a question that was sent in recently.
“Hello, up until recently my husband and I have both had perfect credit. My husband lost his job and we have had to downsize our lives to stay afloat. Where we live (Nevada) the housing market is very upside down and we need to short sale our home. The mortgage company told us that in order to qualify for the short sale we must be at least 60 days behind on payments. When the sale went through we it was reported that we were 90 days late and our credit score took a big hit. What can we do to get our credit back to good?”
This is unfortunately becoming more and more common in our current economy. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the 90 day late payment is not the only negative mark you credit score is going to face. Your short sale will also be reported on your credit report for the next 10 years. And you must legally provide that information when you apply for a new mortgage. The short sale will be a major hit on your credit score, but there is some good news. Short sales and foreclosures are becoming so common that many lenders are looking at the circumstances behind the short sales/foreclosures before they make any final judgments on whether you are loan worthy or not. This will help when you are going to be applying for a new home, it will not help when applying for credit from lenders such as credit cards, or anything that uses automated tools to match your credit score with the minimum needed to provide credit.
These are a the steps I would take to help you get your credit back on track. Enroll in our credit monitoring service and look carefully at your credit reports for any errors that may be on your accounts. If you find any errors have them removed as quickly as you can. Next would be to take a look at your revolving credit accounts. These are you credit cards, try to get your balances below 30% or lower if you can. The quicker you can do this the quicker your score will start to bounce back.
Your installment loans you will not have to worry about paying down the balances quickly, you will just want to make sure you pay them on time, and avoid any late payments if at all possible.
With this plan you will show that you were forced to make a very hard financial decision of selling your home at short sale because of extreme circumstances that you and your husband faced. While you had to short sale your home, you were able to keep up on all your installment loans, and you were able to pay down your credit cards to a very low balances. This will show that you are still very diligent in your credit responsibility and that you should be considered for a new mortgage as soon as you are in a position to afford the payments.
I know right now it seems like your financial world is turned upside down, but taking a probative approach to your credit you will soon start to see your credit scores climbing back every month!
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This is some really scary stuff. Take a look at this new card skimmer over at Gizmodo. Its incredible the level of technology that is out there and how it can be used for evil!
For those of you who are not familiar with the term card skimming, its basically taking a copy of your card, whether that’s a credit card, or debit card. The practice started as soon as the first credit card was printed. The first card skimmers was just a person who wrote down your card information on a scrape of paper and went on their, low tech and effective. And that method will still work today, its just much harder to do anything with the card data that was stolen. If you do not know the pin number, or billing zip code there is not much you can do with it. Adding the protective layer of a pin code, or entering a zip code was as easy and effective way to help prevent this type of card skimming.
Well crooks have taken that to a whole new level. As you can see in the article above, they are creating a fake front that is attached to an ATM machine. In these fake fronts is a card reader, key logger, and a transmitter. You put your card in the ATM machine (these are not limited to ATM’s, anywhere you put your card in could be effected. Gas Pumps are often a very popular target for these skimmers.) and the machine will react exactly as it should, it will give you your cash, or whatever else you needed to do at the ATM. The scary part is skimming device reads and stores your cards information, as well as the pin number or zip code! The thieves now have the information to able to use your credit or debit card.
What can protect yourself from these skimmers? Not much honestly. The most important thing to do is to look very carefully at where you card goes in. Does it look “right”? Does it seem to new for the machine? Does it stick out to far, or sit not quite flush on the machine? Does it look homemade? If there is anything that looks or feels off about the card swipper its best to move on to a different machine!
Right now this is not a wide spread crime, but it has the potential to spread quickly, we will do our best here to keep you up to date on how our credit monitoring can help to protect you from these types of crimes.
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