Your Credit Score, Your Money & What's at Stake (Updated Edition): How to Improve the 3-Digit Number that Shapes Your Financial Future
“A great credit score can help you finish rich! Liz Pulliam Weston gives solid, easy-to-understand advice about how to improve your credit fast. Read this book and prosper.”
David Bach, bestselling author of The Automatic Millionaire and The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner
“Excellent book! Insightful, well written, and surprisingly interesting. Liz Pulliam Weston has done an outstanding job demystifying an often intimidating and frustrating topic for the benefit of all consumers.”
Eric Tyson, syndicated columnist and bestselling author of Personal Finance for Dummies
“No one makes complex financial information easy to understand like Liz Pulliam Weston. Her straight-talk and wise advice are invaluable to anyone with a credit card or check book—and that’s just about all of us.”
Lois P. Frankel, Ph.D., author of Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office and Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich
“In a country where consumers increasingly pay more when they have bad credit, Liz Pulliam Weston’s book provides excellent tips and advice on ways to improve your credit history and raise your credit score. If you just apply one or two of her insightful suggestions, you’ll save many times the cost of this book.”
Ilyce R. Glink, financial reporter, talk show host, and bestselling author of 100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask
“Your credit score can save you money or cost you money—sometimes a lot of money. Yet, most people don’t even know their scores, much less know how to make them better. Liz Pulliam Weston can help you fix that. In this easy-to-understand guide you’ll learn how to make sure your score helps you get the best deal on loans and insurance. You can’t afford not to read it.”
Gerri Detweiler, consumer advocate and founder of UltimateCredit.com
The #1 Best-Selling Guide to Improving Your Credit Score...
Now Thoroughly Updated for the Financial Crisis!
In post-crash America, it’s tough to get credit...and even tougher to get rates and terms you can afford. That makes your credit score more important than ever before. Now, MSN Money/L.A. Times personal finance columnist Liz Pulliam Weston has updated her best-selling book on credit scores to show how you can maximize your score right now—and save yourself a fortune!
Weston reveals the tough new realities of borrowing and credit scoring, and shows why they aren’t going to change any time soon. She rips away the mystery surrounding credit scoring, including the FICO 08 overhaul, and tells you exactly how to use the new system to maximize your score.
You’ll learn how to fight back against lenders who want to lower your limits or raise your rates...bounce back from bad credit and bankruptcy...choose the right credit solutions and avoid options that only make things worse. One step at a t...
“A great credit score can help you finish rich! Liz Pulliam Weston gives solid, easy-to-understand advice about how to improve your credit fast. Read this book and prosper.”
David Bach, bestselling author of The Automatic Millionaire and The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner
“Excellent book! Insightful, well written, and surprisingly interesting. Liz Pulliam Weston has done an outstanding job demystifying an often intimidating and frustrating topic for the benefit of all consumers.”
Eric Tyson, syndicated columnist and bestselling author of Personal Finance for Dummies
“No one makes complex financial information easy to understand like Liz Pulliam Weston. Her straight-talk and wise advice are invaluable to anyone with a credit card or check book—and that’s just about all of us.”
Lois P. Frankel, Ph.D., author of Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office and Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich
“In a country where consumers increasingly pay more when they have bad credit, Liz Pulliam Weston’s book provides excellent tips and advice on ways to improve your credit history and raise your credit score. If you just apply one or two of her insightful suggestions, you’ll save many times the cost of this book.”
Ilyce R. Glink, financial reporter, talk show host, and bestselling author of 100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask
“Your credit score can save you money or cost you money—sometimes a lot of money. Yet, most people don’t even know their scores, much less know how to make them better. Liz Pulliam Weston can help you fix that. In this easy-to-understand guide you’ll learn how to make sure your score helps you get the best deal on loans and insurance. You can’t afford not to read it.”
Gerri Detweiler, consumer advocate and founder of UltimateCredit.com
The #1 Best-Selling Guide to Improving Your Credit Score...
Now Thoroughly Updated for the Financial Crisis!
In post-crash America, it’s tough to get credit...and even tougher to get rates and terms you can afford. That makes your credit score more important than ever before. Now, MSN Money/L.A. Times personal finance columnist Liz Pulliam Weston has updated her best-selling book on credit scores to show how you can maximize your score right now—and save yourself a fortune!
Weston reveals the tough new realities of borrowing and credit scoring, and shows why they aren’t going to change any time soon. She rips away the mystery surrounding credit scoring, including the FICO 08 overhaul, and tells you exactly how to use the new system to maximize your score.
You’ll learn how to fight back against lenders who want to lower your limits or raise your rates...bounce back from bad credit and bankruptcy...choose the right credit solutions and avoid options that only make things worse. One step at a t...
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- Clear Your Credit Report – How to Improve Credit Scores to Better Your Family’s Future
- Secrets of How to Improve Credit Scores: Tips and Secrets Teaching How to Raise, Improve, Fix, and Protect Your Credit Score
- Credit Score And How To Improve Them !
{ 3 comments }
Practical advice on credit score tuning,
The book begins by establishing the importance of a good credit score. While the example that demonstrates this is obviously fictional, it is still a sobering reminder that the cost of credit is something that we usually do not consider when making a purchase.
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I think of myself as a fairly informed consumer, and yet, I learned some new things from this book.
Some key nuggets:
# a payment normally has to be at least 30 days overdue before a creditor reports it to the bureaus, so you can probably stop worrying about that utility bill that you forgot to mail in until a week after it was due.
# Not all debt is equal. You should pay down debt on cards that are closer to the maximum credit limit on that card. In particular, your balance should not exceed 10-30% of your total credit limit.
# Lenders usually report your balance on the closing date for an account to the credit rating agencies. So even if you pay off your credit cards every month, the balance on your card on that reporting day is what affects your credit score. You should try to pay off your balance a few days before the closing date to ensure that you have more head room between your balance and your max credit limit.
# Don’t close your oldest credit accounts. This is because the age of your oldest account and the average age of all your accounts affects your final score.
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On a very subjective level, I found the general level of advice in the book to be fairly ordinary. For example, while its hard to argue with advice like: Don’t raid your retirement accounts, Keep a rainy day fund, Buy only as much house as you need, and Pay off your credit card balances; its still hard to think of this as anything but common wisdom.
However, what I considered off-topic digression for a book titled “Your Credit Score”, may just as easily be seen by others as providing a holistic perspective on credit.
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The “must read” chapters of this book are chps. 4 and 5 – both of which give you invaluable tips on how to tune up your credit score. This is where the heart of this book can be found.
Happy Reading!
- Damodar
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|Valuable book scores in more ways than one,
This updated edition (there’s an updated Introduction, several references to the current credit and banking crisis, and an explanation of FICO 08, the new version of FICO) of YOUR CREDIT SCORE, YOUR MONEY & WHAT’S AT STAKE turned out to be a lot more valuable to me than I thought. I had a good idea of what went into making one’s FICO credit score, but this book debunked a few important myths I believed. As Liz Pulliam Weston explains in the first chapter, “Why Your Credit Score Matters,” even a little ignorance about how to make your score higher can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in higher interest payments over the course of a lifetime.
For example, paying your credit card balances in full each month, while a money-saving good idea, has no bearing on your score. What matters is how close your balance is to your credit limit, regardless of whether you pay it in full or not. The biggest myth? That closing accounts will help raise your score. According to Weston, closing accounts will never raise your score and can frequently lower it. There are several other tidbits where those came from!
At the time of this review, the “Search Inside this Book” function is unavailable, so I think it might be helpful to include the chapter listings:
1 – Why Your Credit Score Matters
2 – How Credit Scoring Works
3 – VantageScore – A Revolution or Just More of the Same?
4 – Improving Your Score – The Right Way
5 – Credit-Scoring Myths
6 – Coping with a Credit Crisis
7 – Rebuilding Your Score After a Credit Disaster
8 – Identify Theft and Your Credit
9 – Emergency! Fixing Your Credit Score Fast
10 – Insurance and Your Credit Score
11 – Keeping Your Score Healthy
While not all of the chapters were useful to my situation, and a lot of the information was known to me, I learned something useful in almost every one. I found the chapter about Insurance (how and why insurers base rates on your credit score) to be especially educational.
I got a LOT of use out of this book. It is clearly written and a quick read. It’s hard to overestimate how important a person’s credit score is to his or her financial life. Highly recommended.
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|Good collection of Information but not strategies,
This book was a good collection of a lot of information regarding what a credit score is and how to make your score better.
The problem is though that a lot of people that have bad credit and trying to improve it, I feel, already have a pretty good grasp of these things. You have to pay your bills on time, the more credit you have the better, etc., etc.
For anyone that doesn’t understand the basics about credit and credit scores or anyone that wants to fill in gaps about their knowledge about the subject, this is a great book that will totally provide you with tons of information about it.
The book missed a star due to what I was alluding to earlier. What I want to know about credit is how to fix it fast and holes in the law that can make fixing my credit faster. For that I recommend the following book:
BEST CREDIT; How to Win the Credit Game, Revised and Updated Edition
I think the two books are great together. One is comprehensive in describing credit and the other is sort of a guide to “beat” the credit “game.” There is definitely overlap, but I also think they are complementary.
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