Even in the best financial times, knowing your credit score and what’s in your credit report is sound practice. Unfortunately, the three credit reporting bureaus make it just about impossible to attain your credit information, especially if you’re a young, mobile individual: the type of person who most needs to know their credit history.

The Bureaus and “Free” Reports

There are three major credit reporting bureaus: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion (occasionally Innovis will be mentioned as a fourth.) Each is a for-profit company: though the main goal is to provide credit information to the “real” customers (banks, rental companies, service providers, and others wishing to extend lines of credit to their customers),  the idea is to move as many paid-for consumer credit reports as possible. Though each is legally obligated to provide an annual credit report, all three never advertise this service. Instead, the credit bureaus push the pay-services, such as freecreditreport.com, and then attempt to upsell you with “maximum protection” packages.

To explicitly state it: freecreditreport.com does provide a free credit report, at no charge to the customer’s credit card. After seven days, however, the company begins a $14.95 per month “monitoring” service. Quoted from the FAQ:

Triple Advantage monitors all three of your national credit reports from Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. You will be notified of several important changes to any of your credit reports with email and, if you choose, SMS Mobile Text messaging alerts. You’ll know about new derogatory information, recent inquiries into your credit, and several
indicators of possible Identity Theft. Remember, Triple Advantage members also receive unlimited copies of their Experian Credit Report and PLUS Score after the trial period.

This part isn’t a bad system, albeit somewhat sneaky: the FAQ pointedly spells out the cost vs. promised benefits. I certainly view it as somewhat of a bait-and-switch, but that’s the basis of all trial offers. But, the tricky bit is that freecreditreport.com doesn’t provide scores or information from Equifax or TransUnion. You can purchase that information separately, of course: the cost is $24.95 per report.

Keep in mind that a credit score, credit history, and credit report can all mean different things. The most useful and valuable information is your credit history, since it influences the information that makes up your FICO score. Your history can be disputed and corrected with your work. The credit score is simply a mechanized weighted average of the different pieces of your credit history. Combined, these are called your “credit report”, but Experian, and eventually the other agencies, will provide a number based on a proprietary algorithm. Try and get your FICO score if possible: this is, by far, the standard used in determining credit worthiness.

Do you need programs like Triple Advantage? I don’t know, I suppose that’s a question of if the system works as Experian and the others want you to believe it does. I haven’t heard enough information one way or the other, but fortunately, if that $14.95 a month seems to pricey, there’s a different, cheaper and arguably better way to keep your credit safe.

Credit Information On Ice

The best way to protect against your credit being used for someone else is a freeze. A freeze works by preventing anyone, including you, from getting your credit history or score. Different states have different guidelines and rules, but most involve a fee per freeze creation, temporary lift (while you seek credit from a lender) and removal. In Massachusetts, the fee is $5 for each of these, or free if you’ve been a victim of identity theft. You’ll need to set up a freeze with each bureau: they don’t carry over.

The most taxing part of the freeze process is the lead time you’ll need to take into account when you apply for new credit. Plan on at least three to five days to lift the freeze, and notify the agencies which creditor(s) will be looking at your account. Having a freeze does not adversely affect your score, and as far as I can tell, it won’t hurt if you accidentally provide the wrong name for a creditor.

Proving you’re you

Anyone who has attempted to retrieve their personal credit history online has undoubtedly run across this sort of question (paraphrased here):

“Our records indicate that in November 1998, you may have opened a home mortgage account. Which bank did you open this with. If none of the options are applicable to you, or you do not pay mortgage payments, please select NONE OF THE ABOVE.

A) SMTH BRNY SAV & LOAN
B) CRESTMARK BANK
C) FIRESTAR BANK
D) CITI BANK
E) NONE OF THE ABOVE”

The credit bureaus claim that this information should only be known to you. The reality is that this question is scary, counter-intuitive, and poorly designed, and probably doesn’t go as far to “protect” you as the credit agencies want you to think.

For starters, there have been a plethora of mergers in the banking sector in the last five to ten years. Smith Barney? Now a part of Citigroup. Which do you pick? And that’s assuming you’re not being “tricked”. I obviously don’t (though I wish I did) have a mortgage payment, but what if someone stole my identity? I can’t answer accurately if I don’t have all of my information meticulously organized, and even then, the very thing I’m trying to prevent could cause me to be locked out of their system.

Keep your financial information together, and know your accounts and history as far back as you can go. The system, terrible as it is, is the one we’ve got right now, so when you face a question like the one above, having your stuff together will really make a difference.

Speaking from experience

Suck it up, invest some time (but not money) into getting copies of your credit report. You can put the burden on the credit bureau and write to them (information on http://www.annualcreditreport.com) providing some personal information such as current and past addresses, as well as your social security number. Unless you’ve been a recent victim of identity theft, don’t waste money on credit-monitoring, and even then, look into alternatives, like credit freezes. Shred your personal financial documents when no longer needed, and never give or leave out personal identifying information like your social security number. Ideally, you shouldn’t carry your SSN in your purse or wallet. Memorize the number, don’t write it down or store it in your cell phone, and keep your original card under lock and key.

Technorati Tags: credit, money, finance

“So if you take the drug and pee on a special piece of paper, a secret message appears. If you don’t take the drug, you can pee on it all you want, but it will not reveal the secret message.”

I can definitely see this extending to doping at the Tour Du France, only the message would be “Allez directement en prison, vous porcine américaine.”

via An Ingenious Approach to Drug Compliance – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

The graph above appears in a post over at Cognitive Daily. Basically, the colored columns for each age group correspond to three different “finding” tasks associated with objects underneath cups. In all three, a reward is hidden under one of two cups, and then the cups are hidden from view while the table rotates 180 degrees (to swap the location of the cups) or 360 degrees (to keep the cups in the same locations). The tasks vary as follows:

• Colored cups: The cups are the visual indicator that a change has or has not occurred.
• Left/Right: The cups are the same color, but the table is the visual indicator: half-black and half-white. The cups occupy exactly one color.
• Top/Bottom: The cups are the same color, and the table is the visual indicator: half-black and half-white. The cups straddle the color division line. If the table is black on top, rotating it 180 degrees means it will be black on the bottom.

To me, the interesting thing is the decrease in performance in the colored cup task: arguably the most basic. I suspect that not enough data was gathered. I’d love to read the article, but not for the $11.95 asking price.

via Cognitive Daily: Human children versus apes: Who’s better at tracking hidden objects, and why.

BumpTM makes swapping contact information as simle as bumping two phones together. No typing, no searching a list for the right person, no shaking your phone, no modem noises, no mistakes.

via Bump Technologies LLC.

Finally, a business-card replacement that makes sense. Bump provides seamless transfer of information using a shared, secured, authorizable medium. You can’t have my contact information unless I want you to have it. I get to pick what contact information you recieve, and there’s no chance for error at data entry.

Simply brilliant. Another reason I’m still impressed with the iPhone and the developer talent.

Saw this list of Twitter uses the other day; kudos to Olin for the top spot (though the list might be unranked) for the 3rd-Floor West Hall laundryroom Twitter agent. Anyone familiar with this know how it works? I don’t remember how the LaundryView system works, but if I recall correctly, there’s e-mail functionality. It’d be interesting to learn more. Reply in comments if you’ve got the details.

First, with cygwin. I tried to set up LaTeX, and hit wall after wall. Getting past using TeTeX instead, I still hit issues with installing Ghostscript, both the windows executable and the binary from cygwin. Something, deep within the belly of the machine is going haywire, but it pains me how easy it is to set up LaTeX and GS in Ubuntu: GS comes pre-installed in Hardy Heron, and after 10 minutes with the CLI I had a full PDF version of Professor Allen Downey’s How To Think Like A Computer Scientist, compiled from source. As of this writing, my windows/GS problems are still unresolved, so thanks, Windows.

The other issue is with unicode boxes in Firefox. Even in FF3.0, you can run into problems with boxes instead of text like this: さんぽ (if you’re seeing boxes here, you’re seeing the problem.) Apparently, Widnows doesn’t have full-on unicode support on by default, so you’ll have to get a full sans-serif Unicode font and install it. A simpler way might be to follow these instructions for Office installations, though YMMV. Don’t forget to restart FF if you go this route.

Even with years of experience, I still slap my head when it comes to understanding the pains and hassles Windows environments face. One of these days…..

At any rate, I know one of my problems is knowing what exactly to blog about. As you can see on the left, the scope is fairly generic. I want to move away from blogging about my life and more towards blogging towards a specific topic. I don’t watch enough TV or see enough movies (shocking!) to blog about them.

But what I do want to post about more is the interesting tidbits and knowledge that I come across in my life: sometimes this will take the form of trivia, other times it will be new vocabulary words, or a surprising statistic. Occasionally, it will be a how-to or fact related to computer engineering, which is not just a hobby, but my current job.

Since philonoist means “a lover of learning”, this fits with the theme of the blog as I originally planned it out. I might, and I mean might start up another wordpress installation with more personal stuff, but that’s very doubtful, as I don’t post that much and I’ve tried it before and it doesn’t work.

Let’s see where this goes…

Having a blog has always been a priority to me, albeit not a very high one. The concept of an unedited, unpoliced space is quite appealing. But my work with Philonoist.net ebbs and flows; I took quite some time off from the blog in 2008. In reading This Year I Will…, M.J. Ryan’s fantastic compendium of tips, tricks, and advice, I rediscovered S.M.A.R.T. goals. Thus, I present one of my goals of 2009.

S – Update philonoist.net with an originial article 3 days a week.
M – Absolutely. It’s trivial to check the article count for a week.
A – The goal is certainly attainable. One early step is to create a list of topic ideas, since part of my problem is finding relevant topics.
R – I definitely can set aside 15-20 minutes three times a week.
T – The goal is valid for the whole year.

Link and vid from Geekologie