Credit Reporting

I had to laugh at a comment made by Ken Doran in response to my post on credit score internet dating.  Ken claimed that while he agrees that people considering joining their lives should share financial information, he wouldn't give a rodent's backside about the future partner’s credit score. Thirty plus years as a consumer bankruptcy attorney has taught him that the reports often contain errors, a fact confirmed by a Federal Trade Commission study finding that 21 percent of reports do contained errors.

The Chicago Tribune is running a Reuters story describing a study from Equifax that student loan write-offs totaled $3 billion in the first quarter of 2013. It's an impressive study. According to the story, "Equifax analyzes data from more than 500 million consumers to track financial trends."

A recent FTC study of errors in credit reports is getting a lot of press. According to the most recent in a number of studies of the accuracy of credit reports, about 5% of U.S. consumers have an error on their credit report that is serious enough to increase their cost of credit. Although the credit industry is arguing that this is a small percentage (and I agree that this is a lot smaller than I expected), the head of the FTC does not consider it small.

Following on to my Acxiom story last week,  check out yesterday’s NYT story on e-scores.  The e-score is a private digitized ranking of consumers in the range of 0 to 99 that tells marketers your full socio- economic status, including your occupation, salary, and home

Do you have good credit? Compared to whom? While your credit price may depend largely on how your credit fares against objective criteria (above 680 to avoid being "subprime," for example), do you ever wonder how you are doing compared to everyone else? Maybe you think the national banks would give credit to a ham sandwich; what you want to know if whether you are  keeping up with the Jones in managing your financial behavior.