Personal Finance News Tuesday 10/2

Phil's Personal Finance Tip of the Day:

10 Common Credit Myths That Could Be Costing You Money
By Erik Carter | Forbes – 22 hours ago

Managing credit is one of the most common subjects that I’ve been getting asked about lately.

Perhaps it’s because so many had their credit scores damaged during the recession and are now trying to improve them in order to qualify for the record low mortgage rates we’ve been seeing. In addition, employers have increasingly been using credit scores to evaluate applicants and especially in this job market, every little factor really counts. So regardless of your motivation to increase your credit score, here are some of the most common credit myths I’ve heard that could be hurting your score:

1) I haven’t done anything wrong so my credit is fine. Even if you’ve done everything right, your credit could still be in trouble. That’s because 70% of credit reports have errors on them. In the likelihood that you have one of them, you could be paying more in interest than you need to be.

2) If I check my credit report, it will hurt my score. Checking your own report generally doesn’t hurt your score but errors do so don’t let this be an excuse not to do it.

3) I’ve checked my credit report and there are no errors so I don’t have anything to worry about. You actually have 3 credit reports (from Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion) so if you’ve only checked one, there’s still a chance that errors on one of the others is hurting you.

4) I can check my credit reports for free at freecreditreport.com. First, many sites like this only give you access to one report, which is from Experian in this case. Second, freecreditreport.com ironically isn’t exactly free. It’s one of many copycat sites that charges you a fee to see your credit report and then charges you a monthly fee unless you cancel within a short period of time. Instead, you’ll want to go to annualcreditreport.com, which allows you truly free access to each of your credit reports once every 12 months.

To read the entire article from Erik Carter | Forbes:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-common-credit-myths-that-could-be-costing-you-money.html 

Scripture of the Day from Dave Ramsey.com:
Habakkuk 2:3 — For the revelation awaits an appointed time; it speaks of the end and will not prove false.

Please listen to the Dave Ramsey show live on WOR 710 from 2-4 PM EST. You can also listen to the 3rd hour 4-5 PM EST. at Dave Ramsey.com.