| How to Build a Better Credit Rating
If you've ever applied for a credit card, a personal loan, or insurance, there's a file about you. This file is known as your credit report. It is chock full of information on where you live, how you pay your bills, and whether you've been sued, arrested, or filed for bankruptcy. Consumer reporting companies sell the information in your report to creditors, insurers, employers, and other businesses with a legitimate need for it. They use the information to evaluate your applications for credit, insurance, employment, or a lease. Having a good credit report means it will be easier for you to get loans and lower interest rates. Lower interest rates usually translate into smaller monthly payments. Nevertheless, newspapers, radio, TV, and the Internet are filled with ads for companies and services that promise to erase accurate negative information in your credit report in exchange for a fee.
Who Plays the 'Blame the Tech' Game?
An anonymous reader asks: "I work for a marketing services company, and it is my department's role to develop and maintain reporting systems for all the data we collect. When a department manager sees a dip (or rise) in one of there KPI's the first thing they do is ask me to 'check out the reporting', because '[they] think there is a problem'? It's this just the culture of my company or have other readers experienced a 'blame the technology first, ask questions later mentality'?" .
Room for small investors
PRIME Minister John Howard last week announced we had reached the stage where more Australians owned shares than were members of a trade union. At the same time, share markets everywhere tumbled in response to a drop in the Chinese market – billions were wiped off prices. This is all good news. We urgently need to get Australians being comfortable with investing in shares because no other investment has the potential for big gains, or the flexibility that shares offer. But investors need to understand that markets can fall suddenly, as well as rise, and that hanging on, or even buying, when the inevitable bad patch hits is the only strategy to adopt. A major benefit is that the income from shares that pay franked dividends is tax-free for anybody earning less than $75,000 a year, while the ability to deal in small parcels makes it easy to minimise capital gains tax.
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