Generally true, but as the article notes gas pumps are a major exception.  A while back, shortly after making several big-ticket purchases I bought gas.  When I got home, there was a message from the Security department of the credit card company on the phone.  They explained that a pay-at-the-pump fuel purchase right after a large purchase had triggered an alert, so they just wanted to verify that our big purchases were legit.  They said crooks like to use a fuel purchase to test whether a stolen card still works.   ... View more

@Anonymous wrote: Ah I didnt notice it at first, the ranges that is.   Scores range from a low of 300 to a high of 620.   No where does it say Fico either.   Perhaps a credit card company has greater freedom to pick whichever scoring model they want, as ooposed to a mortgage lender. Nearly all mortgage loans these days end up being sold on the secondary market, since few mortgage lenders keep loans on their own books. Therefore mortgage lenders basically have to use FICO scores because the secondary market (Fannie, Freddie, etc.) will only take loans that were underwritten using FICO scores. ... View more

@Watchmann wrote: It's bad news .... another effort to prop up the market when it needs to find its true level.  Many homeowners just can't afford their homes, they have to move out so someone else can buy the property at it's true value.  This new plan will not work. You may well be right.   ... View more

@pizzadude wrote:   Wonder if his ego will fit on that 140 sq mile island ??  Might have to add on..... Some years ago I saw a biography entitled The Difference Between Larry Ellison and God*"   In smaller type at the bottom of the cover it said "*God doesn't think he is Larry Ellison."   That's my second-favorite title for a bio (my favorite titlel: after some sports star published an autobiography entitled "Bad As I Wanna Be," his ex-wife published her own book entitled "Worse Than He Says He Is").   I have not read any of the above three books.   ... View more

Now NY Times reportsUS authorities are building criminal cases:   http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/u-s-is-building-criminal-cases-in-rate-fixing/?hp   I would like to see a lot of bank executives behind bars, not only over this but over lots of other charges.  Seems like "too big to fail" has also meant "too big to jail."   ... View more

I think it is way too soon to determine how scoring models need to be changed to reflect the Great Recession, because although the recession is technically over its impacts are still playing out. The economy may not be sinking, but it also is not rising nearly fast enough to create sufficient jobs. One can argue about whether this or that policy would help more, but -- without getting into partisan arguments -- I doubt anybody thinks either party could bring about robust recovery any time soon. This recession was not just a temporary drop in confidence, from which one can expect a quick recovery. This recession was a global deleveraging that made trilions of dollats of paper wealth vanish into thin air. When Nobel-prize wining economists loudly disagree on the causes and consequence of the Great Crash, I'm sure not able to predict where all this will end up. Nor I think, can anybody else make reliable predictions, "especially about the future" as Yogi Berra said.   Also, remember FICO scores are mainly intended to rank-order individuals by credit risk. If the main effect of the crash was to make everybody equally more at risk, then lenders need only raise their cutoff scores based on their loss experience. In data-mining geek lingo, if everybody has become a tad higher risk that is a "main effect." The scoring model still works if there is mostly the same overall main effect of the crash on everybody. But it may be case that some groups of cinsumers were hit harder than others by the crash, in ways not already captured by the scoring models. In data-mining geek lingo, an effect that is bigger for some subsets of your population is known as the "interaction term" in models. Now we come to the crucial point: fitting the interaction term is vastly more sensitive to statistical noise than is fitting the main effect term. Unless great care is taken, interaction terms tend to find signal that ain't really there in the noise. In my day job as a phramaceutical researcher, we call finding signals in tbe noise "overfitting." It may take years to learn how the crash has hit different FICO buckets versus others. ... View more

Guy on NPR says probably nearly every municipality and state in the US has some investments with interest rates tied to LIBOR. Many of them are desperate for money. What do you wanna bet some of them are already getting calls from lawyers offering to go after Barclays and other banks who set LIBOR on a contingency fee basis? Lawyers can smell blood in the water at least as well as cold-blooded sharks can! ... View more

@pizzadude wrote:   Yet another lawsuit against MERS..........   The suit, in St. Clair County Circuit Court, says the banks created a database company, called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, which enabled them to avoid the payment of fees to the county’s recorder of deeds by having MERS assume the mortgage titles.   http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/illinois/banks-sued-for-allegedly-avoiding-property-recording-fees/article_41982548-a35f-11e1-b889-0019bb30f31a.html   The way real estate titles are recorded in the US is very archaic, most rich countries do not even have such a thing as Title Insurance because the National or Provincial government operates a central land registry where it is easy for any interested party to check out a title. Title Insurance is very different from most kinds of insurance because so few of their customers will ever file a claim. Most of the cost of doing business in Title Insurance is paying people to visit County, City, Village, or Town offices to look at paper documents. There are legitimate issues with how the mortgage industry cuts corners in recordkeeping, but the very inefficient ways public records are kept in most states are a huge elephant in this room that journalists rarely mention. If our system for registering titles were less archaic, bankers might not have been tempted to cut corners by robo-signing. I think one or two states do have a central land registry, but in most US states there still are dozens or even hundreds of local offices. I know the public records for my own home are in a Town Hall four miles from here. ... View more

Hmm, several unrelated thoughts   First, my interest in FICO scoring began from intellectual interest in the statistical data mining algorithms used. I work in pharmaceutical R&D, where we use similar statistical tools. Google Framingham Risk Score for an example of a medical scoring model that predicts who is at greatest risk of having a heart attack for instance. One of my data mining textbooks says the borderline between subprime credit and the lower end of good credit is where lenders expend special effort towards finding better ways to rank customers by risk. The borderline customer can be very profitable or very costly, so a lender who can find ways of approving more applicants without increasing risk can make a lot of money. Put another way, if a lender figures out a better way to tell an 810 applicant from a 780 customer that's hardly gonna make much difference because at that range of FICO scores profitability will be dominated by factors other than credit scores anyway. Therefore much innovation both good and bad takes place on the borderline between subprime and low prime credit.   Second, about 30 years ago the US Supreme Court made a very important decision: that States could not enforce their usury laws to restrict interest rates charged to their residents by out-of-state lenders. A couple states promptly eliminated their interest rate caps in order to get banks to set up shop there and thus provide jobs -- which is why if you still pay by paper checks the mailing address will usually be in the Great Plains. This decision enabled lots of financial innovation, some it probably good ideas and some perhaps less good. Before this decision subprime lending basically meant loan sharks who used collection methods not available to legal businesses.   Third, there is considerable political interest in finding ways to improve financial services to those who are known in the industry as "underbanked," people who use check cashing places, prepaid debit cards, and payday lenders. Many people with limited incomes pay much more to use what money they have than do people with stronger finances. A major difficulty with helping these people get better access to banking services is their lack of conventional credit history. So there is significant public policy interest in finding new sources of data to improve credit decisions for those with thin files. Whatever happens in this area, I doubt it will have much effect on how lending decisions are made for people who do have thick conventional credit histories, for whom existing tools work quite well. ... View more

@marty56 wrote: @MattH wrote: When I was a small child, my parents were puzzled because various men came to the door at odd hours. They were very polite, and went away when told the previous residents were not there any more. Eventually my parents learned what the occupation of those two women had been, I won't be specific but you can probably guess! BofA CSRs. LOL! We are talking about the early 1960s, when phoning a bank was very rare, one spoke face-to-face with somebody at a local branch. ... View more

The scores from AMEX are what we here call FAKOs, they are not actual FICO scores. There is a huge amount of deceptive marketing in the credit score business; unless the seller of a score specifically says in so many words that it's a FICO score, you should assume it is probably NOT, especially if they offer three scores because EX does not allow sale of their FICO scores to consumers. Here you can buy EQ and TU scores that actually come from FICO. The EQ here us what many mortgage lenders use. The TU here is an older version, many mortgage lenders now use a newer one. Once upon a time EX scores were also available here, but no more. There are other FICO variants, such as one specially designed for auto loans, that consumers cannot buy anywhere (some auto dealers will tell you). ... View more

@webhopper wrote: You could change your number...     I have people calling for a guy named Christopher all the time... apparently he owed a lot of people and he had my cell phone number before I did... Also learned he played the bagpipes, cause someone called needing a bagpipe player for their grandma's funeral... very bizarre When I was a small child, my parents were puzzled because various men came to the door at odd hours. They were very polite, and went away when told the previous residents were not there any more. Eventually my parents learned what the occupation of those two women had been, I won't be specific but you can probably guess! ... View more

I really really really hope by now OP has spoken with a lawyer! ... View more

I don't worry about such small details so long as the substantive information is correct. Actually I find small variations in my address are interesting because they can indicate whose database was the source of a particular junk mail item. ... View more

@marty56 wrote: @Anonymous wrote:  I will pack my bags as soon as they change their gun laws so I can cross the border with my little friends :P Canada is on my short list of non-US places I would retire to. Yep, been there a few times, nice place. With global warming, by the time I retire maybe the climate will also be suitable. ... View more

@Anonymous wrote: @tonyaether wrote: I was just about to post  a question on this topic then I saw this post....ahh the dread.  So would anyone co-sign for a spouse?  I have always said absolutely not when approached by my DH on the topic.  However, now I am just confused on whether I am being a bad wife by not doing so.  The thought is now crossing my mind again.  I would co-sign for my DGF (when we get married), in a heartbeat. She's done more than enough for me in this lifetime and for the next... but that's because I trust her with every aspect of my life. I wish I could say I was being naive, but she's extremely smart financially, has 800+ credit scores and although she's not a budget master (I am hehe), she's not a wasteful spender either.   Then again, she pretty much fits the bill as one of the people I know LEAST to need a co-signer. So maybe that's why I would do it without hesitation.     Your last sentence is the key: you would cosign for your DGF because you know her to be very responsible, but she would not need a cosigner. The same is true of my wife: I would not hesitate to cosign for her, but I have never had to because she has an excellent credit rating herself. The decision to cosign amounts to making a bet: I think I know this person's risk better than the loan officer does. Usually this is a very bad bet. There are a few exceptions such as a young person or recent immigrant who therefore does not have any credit history yet, in which case somebody who knows the person well could be in a position to perform a more accurate risk assessment. Cosigning can only make sense if you have relevant data not available to the lender to validate your decision. ... View more

@Anonymous wrote: My daughter lived with her boyfriend for a short period of time in his apartment that he signed the lease for (she never signed anything).  Since he didn't pay the rent, he received an eviction notice and judgment against him....Now they also filed a judgement against my daughter stating b/c she lived there with him she was responsible as well.  (Her name was listed as a person living there with him).     Can they really do this?  Any advice would be great..she is so young and doesn't have any credit history and this would not look good.  Would it benefit her to go to the court and complete a "Order to Show Cause," form?    Thank you!!!!  :)   First thing Monday morning you or your daughter must be talking on the phone with a local lawyer. Only a local lawyer will know laws and procedures of your jurisdiction. Only a lawyer to whom your daughter is a client or prospective client will be in a position to consider all relevant facts and provide an informed opininon of possible responses and likely outcomes. Most likely there has not yet been a judgement entered, probably what your daughter got was a Summons or something similar from the Court hearing the case. The key fact about getting a Summons is, a legal clock is ticking so your daughter needs to respond rapudly and correctly. Delay in responding to any notice from a Court can have major consequences, as can responding incorrectly. Therefore delay in speaking to a lawyer could be costly to your daughter. ... View more

@Anonymous wrote: You are correct, the Spanish Influenza did kill more people than died in World War One.  I recently read a book called The Great Influenza; the body count and kill ratio was insane!  The US Military (just the military) suffered more casualities domestically from the flu than they did in the battlefields in Europe!   Many people do not even realize the significance of Memorial Day.  I work at a City job and I honestly wonder if they are following proper criteria by lowering the flag to half mast until noon then raising it for the rest of the day.  I bet that when I go into work in 90 mins it will either be at full mast (and had been there all day) or be at half mast (since the people I work with have no clue). Do they even know, raising a flag to half-mast should take longer than raising it all the way, since proper protocol for half-mast is raise it all the way then lower it? ... View more

@pizzadude wrote: @Anonymous wrote: @Anonymous wrote: if experian didnt want us to know our fico scores then why do some lenders provide it? PSECU provides it for all of their members. its all one big game and we are the suckers who play it It's worth joining for the score!   If Ex wanted us to have a useful score, it would be readily available. IMO its really a matter of profitability.   Why sell you a FICO score that they only make a little money from, when they can invent their own score and make a lot more ? Exactly, if EX sells a FICO score they have to pay FICO for it.  If EX lets FICO sell us a score, EX gets only whatever FICO pays them for the history pull.  If EX sells somebody a FAKO score, they keep the whole fee.   As for PSECU, only people with specific connections to certain PA institutions can apply, so they are just not the sort of competition for FAKO score sales that MyFico represented.     ... View more

For statistics geeks only: in my posting I mentioned r-squared versus testing data.  In building such models it is standard practice to divide the data into two random subsets, one called training data and one called testing data.  You build your model using the training data, then see how well it fits the testing data.  This is done in order to prevent "overfitting" to some quirk of your sample that does not apply to the entire population.   ... View more

@dcal wrote: This is a good subject, You want to know something crazy. I personally, think that Experian has the algorithmn and software to calibrate the Plus scores and other Fako scores into the Fico scores if they wanted to from the Experian site. If they wanted to. They just want to offer the worthless ones to consumers. But I have noticed something weird. By applying for a Amex and a new car (they pull Experian only) where I live and getting a mortgage approval. I noticed that on all occassions My Experian is only 8-10 points higher than my Equifax with pretty much the same information. My TU04 is only 6 points lower than my TU98 here and Credit Karma has consistently been closer to the TU04 (only 3 points difference all year).   I know this may change, but this has been the case 2011 until this month. I know they are fake scores, but they have been dead on. It just make me wonder, if they have a algorithmn to calibrate back forth between the Fako's they crank out for us and the Fico's they let us purchase and the banks and creditors. The credit reporting agency's have had enough time to perfect what they do. Maybe they want us to think it is more complicated than it really is. I think they have the technology to do this, but for whatever reasons they want us to think they don't. They could offer the consumers the Fico's that lenders use, but they just don't want to. I always think this is the case, because I am a forward thinker.     Dcal Most likely any large bank could estimate FICO scores pretty accurately by statistical data crunching.  However, the Terms of Service under which a lender buys FICO scores may have legalese that specifically prohibits reverse engineering.   If a scoring algorithm is both truly independent of FICO scoring and equally good at predicting a person's credit risk, that algorithm would probably be a rather poor predictor of their FICO scores.  Suppose for example that for a certain group of consumers the FICO score has an r-squared (a standard measure in statistics of how well a multiple regression or similar model fits the testing data) of 80% for predicting their credit risk, meaning it accounts for 80% of the variation in their credit risk.  Suppose a certain FAKO score also has an r-squared of 80% but was developed completely independently of FICO.  Well, that FAKO score would have an r-squared for predicting a person's FICO score of about 64% (80% times 80%).  My point is, from the lender's perspective such a FAKO score might have comparable statistical value for classifying applicants according to their credit risk.  But from the perspective of the consumer, we don't really care how well that FAKO score works from the lender's point of view.  We want to know how will lenders see us?  Since most lenders use FICO scores, this means as consumers we need to know actual FICO scores.  A big bank certainly could build a model for estimating the FICO scores of their customers, by purchasing actual FICO scores for a large sample of their customer base and using that as the dependent variable in a modeling project.  Indeed, for a large bank it might be easier to build a FICO-score-predictor model than it would to build a default-predictor model: to build a default-predictor model they would have to follow their sample over time and see which customers defaulted.  To build a FICO-score-predictor model they could just pull FICO scores and crunch data.  But if the bank started using their FICO-score-predictor model to compete with FICO in any way, they would probably hear from FICO's lawyers.  Much safer either to purchase FICO scores or to build their own internal scoring model.   In any case, what incentive does somebody selling FAKO scores to the general public have to strive for high predictive accuracy anyway?  If their "credit score" looks like a FICO score, how many of their customers will know the difference?  How many people know about the totally free and anonymous FICO Estimator, which gives an estimate (probably better than most FAKO scores) of your FICO score from your answers to a few questions?   I work with a number of purchased databases and analytical tools in my job (biopharma R&D).  Many vendors have specific contract language limiting how we may use their data, and how we may not use their data.  In particular, vendors often want to make sure we don't license their product for a short time so we can reverse-engineer it, then switch to our own implementation and stop paying them.   I have never worked in the financial industry, I am in pharmaceutical research.  My interest in FICO scoring began from intellectual curiousity about the algorithms used, because I use very similar algorithms in my work.  Lenders want to know, which of these applicants are most likely to have difficulty paying their bills in the near future?  My company wants to know, which of these people are most likely to have a hear attack or catch HIV or experience whichever medical event is being studied in the near future?  FICO wants to know, of the various facts in a person's credit history, which of them are the best predictors of credit problems?   My company wants to know, out of various medical tests we could do, which of them do the best job of predicting who will respond to our drugs?   For an example of an important medical scoring algorithm, google Framingham risk score The Framingham risk score is an algorithm that estimates a person's risk of heart disease; it is frequently used by physicians to identify people who are at high risk and therefore might benefit from interventions that lower their risk (such as drugs to lower blood pressure or cholesterol).   ... 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@llecs wrote: My vote is to wait. Any program with the name of  "Credit Recovery Program" makes me think of high fees and interest. I think if you waited, you would save thousands on a new car in interest alone, not to mention possible incentives. I agree, "Credit Recovery Program" sounds like a euphemism for "exploit those trying to improve their credit" to me.   ... View more

  I was curious about the design of the GAR star, which is quite common on CT graves.  Since these are metal, they have corroded over the decades and are therefore harder to read today than are stone markers of similar age.  I found the following description of the GAR badge online:   In the center of the badge is the figure of the goddess of liberty, representing loyalty. On either side, a soldier and a sailor clasping hands, representing fraternity, and two children receiving benediction and assurance of protection from the comrades, representing charity. On each side of the group is the National Flag and the Eagle, representing freedom; and the axe, or bundle of rods, or fasco, representing Union. In each point of the star is the insignia of the various branches of service -- the bugle for infantry, the crossed cannons for artillery, the crossed muskets for marines, the crossed sabers for cavalry, and the anchor for the sailors. Over the central groups are the words "Grand Army of the Republic" and under "1861 -- Veterans -- 1866" commemorating the commencement and close of the rebellion and also the date of organization of the Order.   http://garmuslib.org/badge.htm   ... View more