Credit Score Quotes

You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history of economics or science or the arts.

Getting to a higher spiritual level is like increasing your credit score. You get a lot more points for sinning and repenting than if you have no credit history at all.

You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.

Orgasms are a myth. Like good credit scores.

YOU don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you’ve got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.

When we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves, we create a fictitious ceiling. A restriction over the expectations that we have over our own performance in that moment. We get tense. We focus on the outcome instead of the activity and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result or it's too good to be true. But it doesn't and it isn't. And it's not our right to believe it does or is. Don't create imaginary constraints. A leading role, a blue ribbon, a winning score, a great idea, the love of our life, euphoric bliss... Who are we to think we don't deserve these fortunes when they're in our grasp? Who are we to think we haven't earned them? If we stay and process within ourselves, in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at the finish line. Why? Because we're not thinking of the finish line. We're not looking at the clock. We’re not watching ourselves on the Jumbotron performing. We are performing in real time where the approach is the destination.

If you don't take good care of your credit, then your credit won't take good care of you.

Your credit score is unimportant, similar to the number of dates you are supposed to go on before dropping the n-word.

If repairing one's credit is as easy as sending some dispute letters to the credit bureaus then why doesn't everyone have good credit?

Do not let your lack of money and possessions make you feel negative about your worth as a human being. Do not let your credit score, man-made poverty, and/or racism define your extreme power.

Are you willing to accept anything less than the credit you want, the credit you need and the credit you deserve?

I would do anything for you.” His eyes locked onto mine in the dashboard lights, intense and a little hurt. “What is it going to take for you to believe me? To trust me? You want my background checked? Do it. You want my credit score? Awesome. My bank account? I’ll add you on. You have my word, my body, my time, and I’m standing here offering my last name. What else can I give you?

You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.

There isn’t a name for my situation. Firstly because I decided to kill myself. And then because of this idea: I don’t have to do it immediately. Whoosh, through a little door. It’s a limbo. I need never answer the phone again or pay a bill. My credit score no longer matters. Fears and compulsions don’t matter. Socks don’t matter. Because I’ll be dead. And who am I to die? A microwave chef. A writer of pamphlets. A product of our time. A failed student. A faulty man. A bad poet. An activist in two minds. A drinker of chocolate milk, and when there’s no chocolate, of strawberry and sometimes banana.

What's the difference between sanity and madness anyway? We all play headgames with ourselves. We all have baggage. We all cope somehow. I'm not sure if I'm mad or sane. I mean, I hold my life together, I pay my bills, I raise my kids. But the world is so polarized and bizarre now that for some people, none of these these things matter if they're not wearing the right shoes or don't have the right credit score or a fancy family car. Some people think the most important things to worry about are handbags and tan lines. Meanwhile, war and crime and poverty unfold all around us, and we ignore it. In that environment, how can we even begin to talk about sanity and madness?

You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justif your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you've got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.

You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.

social media addict? This is a very real problem—so much so that researchers from Norway developed a new instrument to measure Facebook addiction called the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale.[3] Social media has become as ubiquitous as television in our everyday lives, and this research shows that multitasking social media can be as addictive as drugs, alcohol, and chemical substance abuse. A large number of friends on social media networks may appear impressive, but according to a new report, the more social circles a person is linked to, the more likely the social media will be a source of stress.[4] It can also have a detrimental effect on consumer well-being because milkshake-multitasking interferes with clear thinking and decision-making, which lowers self-control and leads to rash, impulsive buying and poor eating decisions. Greater social media use is associated with a higher body mass index, increased binge eating, a lower credit score, and higher levels of credit card debt for consumers with many close friends in their social network—all caused by a lack of self-control.[5] We Can Become Shallow

I'm not going to tell you much more of the case, Doctor. You know a conjuror gets no credit when once he has explained his trick; and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all." "I shall never do that," I answered; "you have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world." My companion flushed up with pleasure at my words, and the earnest way in which I uttered them. I had already observed that he was a sensitive to flattery on the score of his art as any girl could be of her beauty.

You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you've got. You have to find people who love you truly and love you back with the same truth. But that's all.

Shut it,” he said and whipped out his credit card.

And in Florida, adults with clean driving records and poor credit scores paid an average of $1,552 more than the same drivers with excellent credit and a drunk driving conviction.

Electricity, shelter, and a safe place to sleep . . . trump the need to preserve your credit score, or purchase a new gizmo.

As we’ve seen, they (the companies) routinely reject applicants on the basis of credit scores and personality tests. Health scores represent a natural—and frightening—next step.

Poor people daily seek to increase their credit score, while wealthy people daily seek to increase their net worth.

You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.

Credit risk is a major concern in business lending, and lenders use credit scoring models specific to businesses. As an entrepreneur, you need to have a clear credit and distinct strategy for your business’s credit.

Virginity is a concept invented by people to make women feel worthless for having sex.” I raise my eyebrows matter-of-factly. “You want to worry about protecting something. Protect your credit score. That’ll come in a lot handier someday.

...her other paramour was a student at the UASD -- one of those City College types who's been in school eleven years and is always five credits shy of a degree. Students today don't mean na; but in Latin America whipped into a frenzy by the fall of Arbenz, by the stoning of Nixon, by the Guerillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs -- in a Latin America already a year and a half into the Decade of Guerilla -- a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe. Such a student was Arquimedes. He also listened to the shortwave, but not for Dodgers scores; what he risked his life for was the news leaking out of Havana, news of the future. Arquemides was, therefore, a student, the son of a Zapatero and a midwife, a tirapiedra and a quemagoma for life. Being a student wasn't a joke, not with Trujillo and Johnny Abbes scooping up everybody following the foiled Cuban Invasion of 1959.

Because I have so many deeply held opinions about gender equality, I feel a lot of pressure to live up to certain ideals. I am supposed to be a good feminist who is having it all, doing it all. Really, though, I’m a woman in her thirties struggling to accept herself and her credit score. For so long I told myself I was not this woman—utterly human and flawed. I worked overtime to be anything but this woman, and it was exhausting and unsustainable and even harder than simply embracing who I am.

Fortune, in fact, is a pestilent shrew, and, withal, an inexorable creditor; and though for a time she may be all smiles and courtesies, and indulge us in long credits, yet sooner or later she brings up her arrears with a vengeance, and washes out her scores with our tears.

You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.

The true blessing of the mountains is not that they provide a challenge or a contest, something to be overcome and dominated (although this is how many people have approached them). It is that they offer something gentler and infinitely more powerful: they make us ready to credit marvels - whether it is the dark swirl which water makes beneath a plate of ice, or the feel of the soft pelts of moss which form on the lee sides of boulders and trees. Being in the mountains reignites our astonishment at the simplest transactions of the physical world: a snowflake a millionth of an ounce in weight falling on to one's outstretched palm, water patiently carving a runnel in a face of granite, the apparently motiveless shift of a stone in a scree-filled gully. Tu put a hand down and feel the ridges and score in a rock where a glaciers has passed, to hear how a hillside comes alive with moving water after a rain shower, to see late summer light filling miles of landscape like an inexhaustible liquid - none of these is a trivial experience. Mountains returns to us priceless capacity for wonder which can so insensibly be leached away by modern existence, and they urge us to apply that wonder to our own everyday lives.

Isn't it sad that we have to gain control of the artificial numbers placed upon us by others to regain some control of our lives?

Bankers throughout time have used what we call ‘‘The Five C’s of Credit’ as a basis of evaluating the worthiness of a potential borrower.

The Poor is no longer not just having enough, but poverty is in fact, not having more than the debts you owe!!! - - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

That one’s yours and that one’s mine.” Like we’re cars. And I don’t feel like I’ve ever been one of the good cars. No one’s ever seen me and said, “I get that one!” They’re more like, “I get that one? Um, okay.” Or even, “I get that one? You owe me.” It’s so sad to think that people are incurring debt based on my appearance. I’d hate to hurt someone’s credit score. So

There's a Spanish proverb that's always fascinated me. 'Take what you want and pay for it, says God.' I don't believe in God, but that principle seems, to me, to have a divinity of its own; a kind of blazing purity. What could be simpler, or more crucial? You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it. It seems to me, that we as a society have come to overlook the second clause. We hear only 'Take what you want, says God'; nobody mentions a price, and when it comes time to settle the score, everyone's outraged. We've become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we're so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.

Oh well,' said Jack: and then, 'Did you ever meet Bach?' 'Which Bach?' 'London Bach.' 'Not I.' 'I did. He wrote some pieces for my uncle Fisher, and his young man copied them out fair. But they were lost years and years ago, so last time I was in town I went to see whether I could find the originals: the young man has set up on his own, having inherited his master's music-library. We searched through the papers — such a disorder you would hardly credit, and I had always supposed publishers were as neat as bees — we searched for hours, and no uncle's pieces did we find. But the whole point is this: Bach had a father.' 'Heavens, Jack, what things you tell me. Yet upon recollection I seem to have known other men in much the same case.' 'And this father, this old Bach, you understand me, had written piles and piles of musical scores in the pantry.' 'A whimsical place to compose in, perhaps; but then birds sing in trees, do they not? Why not antediluvian Germans in a pantry?' 'I mean the piles were kept in the pantry. Mice and blackbeetles and cook-maids had played Old Harry with some cantatas and a vast great passion according to St Mark, in High Dutch; but lower down all was well, and I brought away several pieces, 'cello for you, fiddle for me, and some for both together. It is strange stuff, fugues and suites of the last age, crabbed and knotted sometimes and not at all in the modern taste, but I do assure you, Stephen, there is meat in it. I have tried this partita in C a good many times, and the argument goes so deep, so close and deep, that I scarcely follow it yet, let alone make it sing. How I should love to hear it played really well — to hear Viotti dashing away.

Even with the bundling and splitting of tranches, Wall Street needed more mortgage borrowers, so it created the subprime market. These were loans to borrowers who did not meet the underwriting standards set forth by the GSEs, or “prime” loans. Subprime borrowers were riskier borrowers, either because they had fewer assets, lower credit score, or lower incomes. But in finance, higher risk is rewarded with higher yield, so mortgage brokers made even higher premiums from subprime loans.

Once companies amass troves of data on employees’ health, what will stop them from developing health scores and wielding them to sift through job candidates? Much of the proxy data collected, whether step counts or sleeping patterns, is not protected by law, so it would theoretically be perfectly legal. And it would make sense. As we’ve seen, they routinely reject applicants on the basis of credit scores and personality tests. Health scores represent a natural—and frightening—next step.

Dr. Spencer Eth, who ran the psychiatry department at the now-defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, was curious where survivors had turned for help, and early in 2002, together with some medical students, he conducted a survey of 225 people who had escaped from the Twin Towers. Asked what had been most helpful in overcoming the effects of their experience, the survivors credited acupuncture, massage, yoga, and EMDR, in that order.1 Among rescue workers, massages were particularly popular.

Companies capitalize off people’s unwillingness to patiently wait… Top companies understand this demand and respond, “No problem, I will give it to you now, but you will have to pay.” - - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

The practice of using credit scores in hirings and promotions creates a dangerous poverty cycle. After all, if you can’t get a job because of your credit record, that record will likely get worse, making it even harder to land work. It’s not unlike the problem young people face when they look for their first job—and are disqualified for lack of experience. Or the plight of the longtime unemployed, who find that few will hire them because they’ve been without a job for too long. It’s a spiraling and defeating feedback loop for the unlucky people caught up in it.

the Feds had also found Netcom’s customer database that contained more than 20,000 credit card numbers on my computer, but I had never attempted to use any of them; no prosecutor would ever be able to make a case against me on that score. I have to admit, I had liked the idea that I could use a different credit card every day for the rest of my life without ever running out. But I’d never had any intention of running up charges on them, and never did. That would be wrong. My trophy was a copy of Netcom’s customer database. Why is that so hard to understand? Hackers and gamers get it instinctively. Anyone who loves to play chess knows that it’s enough to defeat your opponent. You don’t have to loot his kingdom or seize his assets to make it worthwhile.

Now you fall across the bed when you're not sleepy but just tired of the way you live--or aren't living. From the outside you shouldn't be complaining, but success and a good credit score can't love you. Or give you an orgasm. You even empty the trash and wonder what you're really throwing away. You comb your hair and put on makeup and buy something pretty to wear and get your nails and toes painted hot pink even though you don't feel hot, and you wonder who will even notice. You shave your legs and under your arms and get your eyebrows waxed, and you wonder who will notice. And then, one day, out of nowhere, you stop wondering and start worrying that the best part of your life is behind you. Is this how it's going to be forever? Is this all there is? God, you hope not.

If we step back from the progressive argument and put it in any other context, its absurdity immediately becomes apparent. Imagine if I were to say to my daughter, who got a high score on the SAT, “You don’t deserve your scores at all. You didn’t build that. After all, young lady, you had teachers who helped you with vocabulary and math. Moreover, you took the public roads to the test. Had your car been held up along the way or caught fire, you would count on the services of the police and the fire department. So society deserves a large part of the credit for those scores. They don’t reflect your accomplishment but society’s accomplishment.” If I said this I am sure my daughter would think I was talking like an insane person. In fact, of course, I would be talking like a progressive.

All of us believe you belong here,” I’d said to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson girls as they sat, many of them looking a little awestruck, in the Gothic old-world dining hall at Oxford, surrounded by university professors and students who’d come out for the day to mentor them. I said something similar anytime we had kids visit the White House—teens we invited from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation; children from local schools who showed up to work in the garden; high schoolers who came for our career days and workshops in fashion, music, and poetry; even kids I only got to give a quick but emphatic hug to in a rope line. The message was always the same. You belong. You matter. I think highly of you. An economist from a British university would later put out a study that looked at the test performances of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson students, finding that their overall scores jumped significantly after I’d started connecting with them—the equivalent of moving from a C average to an A. Any credit for improvement really belonged to the girls, their teachers, and the daily work they did together, but it also affirmed the idea that kids will invest more when they feel they’re being invested in. I understood that there was power in showing children my regard.

What happened to your arm?" she asked me one night in the Gentleman Loser, the three of us drinking at a small table in a corner. Hang-gliding," I said, "accident." Hang-gliding over a wheatfield," said Bobby, "place called Kiev. Our Jack's just hanging there in the dark, under a Nightwing parafoil, with fifty kilos of radar jammed between his legs, and some Russian asshole accidentally burns his arm off with a laser." I don't remember how I changed the subject, but I did. I was still telling myself that it wasn't Rikki who getting to me, but what Bobby was doing with her. I'd known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep. I didn't like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it only made it worse. He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I'd seen it happen a dozen times before. He might as well have had next printed across his sunglasses in green Day-Glo capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser. I knew what he did to them. He turned them into emblems, sigils on the map of his hustler' s life, navigation beacons he could follow through a sea of bars and neon. What else did he have to steer by? He didn't love money, in and of itself , not enough to follow its lights. He wouldn't work for power over other people; he hated the responsibility it brings. He had some basic pride in his skill, but that was never enough to keep him pushing. So he made do with women. When Rikki showed up, he needed one in the worst way. He was fading fast, and smart money was already whispering that the edge was off his game. He needed that one big score, and soon, because he didn't know any other kind of life, and all his clocks were set for hustler's time, calibrated in risk and adrenaline and that supernal dawn calm that comes when every move's proved right and a sweet lump of someone else's credit clicks into your own account.

One day over breakfast, a medical resident asked how Dr. Apgar would make a systematic assessment of a newborn. “That’s easy,” she replied. “You would do it like this.” Apgar jotted down five variables (heart rate, respiration, reflex, muscle tone, and color) and three scores (0, 1, or 2, depending on the robustness of each sign). Realizing that she might have made a breakthrough that any delivery room could implement, Apgar began rating infants by this rule one minute after they were born. A baby with a total score of 8 or above was likely to be pink, squirming, crying, grimacing, with a pulse of 100 or more—in good shape. A baby with a score of 4 or below was probably bluish, flaccid, passive, with a slow or weak pulse—in need of immediate intervention. Applying Apgar’s score, the staff in delivery rooms finally had consistent standards for determining which babies were in trouble, and the formula is credited for an important contribution to reducing infant mortality. The Apgar test is still used every day in every delivery room.

Have Candace bring the ball up,” she said urgently. It was totally counterintuitive: Candace was our go-to player, on whom we counted when we needed a score. If Candace brought the ball up the court, that meant she’d have to pass it off. It meant someone else would take the last shot of the game. It meant that if we lost, everyone in the country would want to know why we hadn’t gone to the best player in the game. I nodded. It was a high-stakes decision. But I loved being the trigger puller. Loved it. I went into the huddle—and made the last critical call I would ever make in an NCAA Final Four. I looked at Lex, who would be our inbounder. “Get the ball in to Candace,” I said. I turned to Candace. “They will converge on you. Find the open player.” They all nodded and took their places. What happened next is a credit to the culture of a program in which players are taught to commit, to play all out, to attend to every detail no matter how seemingly unimportant, to never go through the motions, no matter how routine seeming, to finish with as much energy as they started with.

Which one was it? He’ll pay for it with his life, I swear to you.” “Settle down, Gray. And for God’s sake, don’t go punching yourself in the eye just to even the score.” Gray shot him a look. “Not amusing, Joss.” “Oh yes, it is. Give me credit for a joke when I make one. It’s nothing, Gray. I’ve had worse. You’ve given me worse. And it’s no more than a man can expect, I suppose, when he’s an alleged pirate.” “Piracy charges.” Gray cracked his neck. “What a joke.” This was the voyage he’d finally gone respectable, and what had it gotten him? Jilted and jailed. No good deed went unpunished.

Immigrants who had never failed to repay a debt, because they had never been given a loan, often had surprisingly high thin-file FICO scores. Thus a Jamaican baby nurse or Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 looking to borrow three-quarters of a million dollars, when filtered through the models at Moody’s and S&P, became suddenly more useful, from a credit-rigging point of view. They might actually improve the perceived quality of the pool of loans and increase the percentage that could be declared triple-A. The Mexican harvested strawberries; Wall Street harvested his FICO score.

He had lived a man's life, and now it was at an end, and what had he to show for it? Two horses and a few fixin's and a letter of credit for three hundred and forty-three dollars. That was all, unless you counted the way he had felt about living and the fun he had had while time ran along unnoticed. It had been rich doings, except that he wondered at the last, seeing everything behind him and nothing ahead. It was strange about time: it slipped under a man like quiet water, soft and unheeded but taking a part of him with every drop - a little quickness of the muscles, a little sharpness of the eye, a little of his youngness, until by and by he found it had taken the best of him almost unbeknownst. He wanted to fight it then, to hold it back, to catch what had been borne away. It wasn't that he minded going under, it wasn't that he was afraid to die and rot and forget and be forgotten; it was that things were lost to him more and more - the happy feeling, the strong doing, the fresh taste for things like drink and women and danger, the friends he had fought and funned with, the notion that each new day would be better than the last, good as the last one was. A man's later life was all a long losing, of friends and fun and hope, until at last time took the mite that was left of him and so closed the score.

Let’s define a Crapitalist: A well-connected friend of the powers that be who scores big bucks at taxpayer expense. From bagging millions in tax dollars for phony “green energy” companies that go bust, to vacuuming public coffers to build glitzy sports stadiums, to utilizing little-known tax credit loopholes to loot $1.5 billion a year for Hollywood movies—Crapitalists know how to use every trick to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. Rather than playing and winning in the rough-and-tumble world of business competition, Crapitalists use government to rig the game in their favor and leave you and me—the taxpayers—holding the bill. These corporate sissies know their ideas suck, so they try to stack the deck to privatize their profits and socialize their losses. And there’s the rub: crony capitalism is socialism’s Trojan horse.

It revealed the bait and switch at the heart of standardized tests—the exact thing that made them unfair: She was teaching test-taking form for standardized exams that purportedly measured intellectual strength. My classmates and I would get higher scores—two hundred points, as promised—than poorer students, who might be equivalent in intellectual strength but did not have the resources or, in some cases, even the awareness to acquire better form through high-priced prep courses. Because of the way the human mind works—the so-called “attribution effect,” which drives us to take personal credit for any success—those of us who prepped for the test would score higher and then walk into better opportunities thinking it was all about us: that we were better and smarter than the rest and we even had inarguable, quantifiable proof. Look at our scores!

In other words, you need to be a bureaucracy in order to survive one. This is the overwhelming narrative of modern American economics, that the individual, particularly the individual without a lot of money, is inherently overmatched. He’s a loser. And if he falls into any part of the machine, he goes straight to the bottom. And then there’s the most disturbing truth of all. People assume that a system that favors the rich likes rich people. This isn’t true. Our bureaucracies respond to the money rich people have, and they bend to the legal might the rich can hire, but they don’t give a damn about rich people. You can be rich and still fall into any one of a dozen financial/legal meat grinders, from an erroneously collapsed credit score to a robo-signed foreclosure to a stolen identity to a retirement account vaporized by institutional theft and fraud. The system eats up rich people, too, because it’s not concerned with protecting any individuals, even the rich ones. These bureaucracies accomplish just two things: they make small piles of money smaller and big piles of money bigger. It’s a system that doesn’t care whose hands end up holding the bag, or how long those hands get to hold the bag. It just relentlessly creates and punishes losers, who get to sit beneath an ever-narrowing group of winners, who may or may not stay on top for long. What does get preserved, in all cases, is a small constellation of sprawling, interconnected financial companies, whose names and managements may change (Bear becomes Chase, Wachovia becomes Wells Fargo, etc.), but whose entrenched influence remains the same. In other words, this is a machine that loves and protects money but somehow hates all people.

In this march through a virtual lifetime, we’ve visited school and college, the courts and the workplace, even the voting booth. Along the way, we’ve witnessed the destruction caused by WMDs. Promising efficiency and fairness, they distort higher education, drive up debt, spur mass incarceration, pummel the poor at nearly every juncture, and undermine democracy. It might seem like the logical response is to disarm these weapons, one by one. The problem is that they’re feeding on each other. Poor people are more likely to have bad credit and live in high-crime neighborhoods, surrounded by other poor people. Once the dark universe of WMDs digests that data, it showers them with predatory ads for subprime loans or for-profit schools. It sends more police to arrest them, and when they’re convicted it sentences them to longer terms. This data feeds into other WMDs, which score the same people as high risks or easy targets and proceed to block them from jobs, while jacking up their rates for mortgages, car loans, and every kind of insurance imaginable. This drives their credit rating down further, creating nothing less than a death spiral of modeling. Being poor in a world of WMDs is getting more and more dangerous and expensive.

You ever choked? You know what I mean, fumbled at the goal line, stuck your foot in your mouth when you were trying to ask that girl on a date, had a brain freeze on the final exam you were totally prepared for, lipped out a three-foot putt to win the golf tournament, or been paralyzed by the feeling of “Oh my god life can’t get any better, do I really deserve this?” I have. What happens when we get that feeling? We clench up, get short of breath, self-conscious. We have an out-of-body experience where we observe ourselves in the third person, no longer present, now not doing well what we are there to do. We become voyeurs of our moment because we let it become bigger than us, and in doing so, we just became less involved in it and more impressed with it. Why does this happen? It happens because when we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves, we then create a fictitious ceiling, a restriction, over the expectations we have of our own performance in that moment. We get tense, we focus on the outcome instead of the activity, and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result, or it’s too good to be true. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t, and it’s not our right to believe it does or is. Don’t create imaginary constraints. A leading role, a blue ribbon, a winning score, a great

It seems to me," he said, "that we as a society have come to overlook the second clause. We hear only 'Take what you want, says God'; nobody mentions a price, and when it comes time to settle the score, everyone's outraged. Take the national economic explosion, as the most obvious example: that's come at a price, and a very steep one, to my mind. We have sushi bars and SUVs, but people our age can't afford homes in the city where they grew up, so centuries-old communities are disintegrating like sand castles. People spend five or six hours a day in traffic; parents never see their children, because they both have to work overtime to make ends meet. We no longer have time for culture--theaters are closing, architecture is being wrecked to make way for office blocks. And so on and so forth." He didn't sound even mildly indignant, only absorbed. "I don't consider this anything to become incensed about," he said, reading my look. "In fact, it shouldn't be remotely surprising to anyone. We've taken what we wanted and we're paying for it, and no doubt many people feel that on balance the deal is a good one. What I do find surprising is the frantic silence that surrounds this price. The politicians tell us, constantly, that we live in Utopia. If anyone with any visibility ever suggests that this bliss may not come free, then that dreadful little man--what's his name? the prime minister--comes on the television, not to point out that this toll is the law of nature, but to deny furiously that it exists and to scold us like children for mentioning it. I finally had to get rid of the television," he added, a little peevishly. "We've become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we're so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.

Saying it hopes to poach customers from banks, Walmart is rolling out a mobile checking account with a linked debit card — a program that it promises will remain low-cost by eliminating fees for overdrafts or failing to maintain a minimum balance. The monthly membership fee of $8.95 is waived if customers set up direct deposits of at least $500 a month, something that even consumers with subprime credit scores probably would be able to do. Users also may load cash into their accounts at participating stores or deposit checks remotely by taking photos with their smartphones, officials at the Bentonville, Ark., company said.

Note, however, that a community’s supply of social rewards is limited, so we’re often competing to show more loyalty than others—to engage in a “holier than thou” arms race. And this leads, predictably, to the kind of extreme displays and exaggerated features we find across the biological world. If the Hajj seems extravagant, remember the peacock’s tail or the towering redwoods. But note, crucially, that sacrifice isn’t a zero-sum game; there are big benefits that accrue to the entire community. All these sacrifices work to maintain high levels of commitment and trust among community members, which ultimately reduces the need to monitor everyone’s behavior.38 The net result is the ability to sustain cooperative groups at larger scales and over longer periods of time.39 Today, we facilitate trust between strangers using contracts, credit scores, and letters of reference. But before these institutions had been invented, weekly worship and other costly sacrifices were a vital social technology. In 1000 a.d., church attendance was a pretty good (though imperfect) way to gauge whether someone was trustworthy. You’d be understandably wary of your neighbors who didn’t come to church, for example, because they’re not “paying their dues” to the community. Society can’t trust you unless you put some skin in the game.

Chapter 3 What to Do with Money as You Save It Chapters 1 and 2 should have helped you understand the theory behind frugality and develop a practical plan to live on less than half your take-home pay; all in the context of building up your first $25,000. After reading those two chapters, you should understand what you need to do to put yourself in position to save thousands of dollars per month on a middle class income. Now, it’s time to deploy those savings in such a way as to develop your first year of financial runway. Your goal is stockpile a reserve capable of funding your frugal lifestyle for around a full year. Unlike many Americans who struggle to make ends meet, you now face a new problem. A good problem. You now have to decide how to deploy your rapidly expanding savings so that they extend your financial runway as much as possible. There are three initial steps that should be completed, in order, for the seeker of early financial freedom to build up that one-year stockpile. These three steps are (1) to build up an emergency fund of $1000 to $2000; (2) to pay off all “bad debts” (we define this term below) and build strong credit; and then (3) to build up one year of financial runway in the form of cash or equivalents By completing these three steps, readers will set themselves up for the next phase of wealth generation, discussed in part II. They will have the cash and credit they need to buy a home with ease, and will have the financial runway they need to pursue career opportunities with little risk of financial ruin. Central to the discussion in this chapter will be the concepts of debt—both good and bad debt—and credit. We must pay off our bad debts immediately, and treat them as a financial crisis. Good debts can still delay financial freedom, but may not need to be paid off early if money can be put to higher and better use in the meantime. While paying off bad debts and managing other debts, readers will want to focus on improving their credit scores as much as possible, and increase their access to credit.

Between the 1984–85 and 2011–12 school years, there was an increase of 921 percent in the number of high school students taking Advanced Placement courses, as well as an increase in the number of tests per student, from 1.37 to 1.76.11 While you might expect that such an expansion would have a negative effect on scores, the percentage of students scoring the top marks of 4 or 5 on their tests stayed constant. 12 A passing score on a high school AP exam counts for credit at over four thousand institutions of higher education, and many of the schools that don’t count them for credit still de facto require them for admission. They are supposed to have the rigor of college classes. The rate of AP class expansion is both example and index of the larger trend: A lot more kids are working a lot harder. For a more micro

Credit reporting agencies and other consumer data aggregators are extremely good at returning complete and accurate information even when identities are manipulated. It’s central to their business and there are extraordinary business and regulatory pressures on them to do this well. However, finding all of the relevant data sources, investigating documents provided in many different formats, putting it all together and offering a clear scoring decision is not something that can be easily accomplished.

A White House briefing memo encouraged the companies to develop a “radicalism algorithm” that would digest social media and other sources of surplus to produce something comparable to a credit score, but aimed at evaluating the “radicalness” of online content.

One probable near-term outcome of AI and a through-line in all three of the scenarios is the emergence of what I’ll call a “personal data record,” or PDR. This is a single unifying ledger that includes all of the data we create as a result of our digital usage (think internet and mobile phones), but it would also include other sources of information: our school and work histories (diplomas, previous and current employers); our legal records (marriages, divorces, arrests); our financial records (home mortgages, credit scores, loans, taxes); travel (countries visited, visas); dating history (online apps); health (electronic health records, genetic screening results, exercise habits); and shopping history (online retailers, in-store coupon use). In China, a PDR would also include all the social credit score data described in the last chapter.

Any bank that does commercial real estate loans is going to measure four things to determine whether they will give you a loan: 1) The property. 2) Trailing 12 to 24 months of income. 3) Your credit score and net worth. 4) Your experience managing properties.

your debt payment history represents 35 percent of your credit score—the largest chunk.

I bet I’ve led a more virtuous life than you.” “First, darlin’, that’s not saying much. Second, getting to a higher spiritual level is like increasing your credit score. You get a lot more points for sinning and repenting than if you have no credit history at all.” -Ella & Jack

When their subjects were between the ages of three and eleven, the researchers, led by the psychologists Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt and including Brent Roberts, used a variety of tests and questionnaires to measure the children’s self-control and then combined those results into a single self-control rating for each child. When they surveyed the subjects at age thirty-two, they found that the childhood self-control measure had predicted a wide array of outcomes. The lower a subject’s self-control in childhood, the more likely he or she was at thirty-two to smoke, to have health problems, to have a bad credit rating, and to have been in trouble with the law. In some cases, the effect sizes were huge: Adults with the lowest self-control scores in childhood were three times more likely to have been convicted of a crime than those who scored highest as kids. They were three times more likely to have multiple addictions, and they were more than twice as likely to be raising their children in a single-parent household.

Co-signing can become a curse because the Co-signer, the one that has the better credit, holds the greatest risk. - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

The surprising part of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, is that the lawmakers even admit that the abusive tactics of the debt collectors contributed to several painful results. The top negative consequences were personal bankruptcies, marital instability, the loss of jobs, and the invasion of individual privacy. - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

The reality is - A high Debt to Income Ratio can counter a high Credit Score!!! - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

Credit Repair Companies walk a very fine line as it pertains to “False Advertising.” Their advertisements target those that are desperate, in need of a quick fix, or both without the targeted fully understanding the Credit Laws and the Credit Repair Process. - - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

Being an authorized user generates more of a risk than a reward. You are putting your credit in the hands of others. The previous statement implies their mistakes, now becomes yours! - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

Paying $99.00 a month for a maybe is a “risk” that ends up taking your “reward.” - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

In times past, your social security number was the most influential number known to man… However, there is a three digit number that is giving the social security number a run for its money… - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

All the offers in the mail are waiting for your failure, not thinking about your financial future! - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

The best person to “face” the problem is also the best person to “fix” the problem – that is you!!! - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

Bruce Mesnekoff Discussing About Refinancing Student Loan and Consolidation Loan repayment is a major goal for any graduate after college. According to our Expert from Student Loan Help Center, Mr.Bruce Mesnekoff, Every individual dreams of a loan free future and having some financial stability. To achieve this, there are options available to help with loan repayment. In our earlier article we spoke about consolidating student loans. In this article, we will discuss refinancing student loans and its associated advantages. So Bruce Mesnekoff, how consolidation and refinancing are different in terms? These two terms are used interchangeably by most people but there is substantial difference between the two. Understanding the difference is critical to know when can each be used and whether it will solve your purpose or not. Consolidation lets you combine all your student loans into one loan and pay interest at a weighted average. Refinancing is taking a new loan to pay off all your student loans. Refinancing is not available for federal loans but only for private loans.Also only private loan lenders provide the option of refinancing, though a few might provide you with the option of refinancing private and federal loans. Why Refinancing and Bruce Mesnekoff tells us what are the Advantages of it? Refinancing has certain benefits if you get good pay. You will have to pay lesser interest rate. This helps you save monthly and eventually a bigger bank balance down the years. Your credit score is high which will help you gain multiple offers from lenders with lesser interest rate. Offers you variable loan interest which come handy if you took loan when interest rates were too high. You also have the option of decreasing your loan repayment cycle, This will increase monthly repayment amount but you will be loan free in shorter time and will save on even more interest money. Disadvantages There is one major disadvantage that comes when you refinance private and federal loans. The benefits offered by federal loans like public loan forgiveness program or income driven repayment will not be transferred to private lenders. So if you are truly confident of your income then you can do away with such options and completely rely on private loans. So Bruce Mesnekoff , Can you tell us Eligibility Criteria, I think its most important for our students. The eligibility is determined by your financial stability, your credit score, employment history etc. If you have poor credit, you can always have a co-signer to make the process feasible. Refinancing is surely a great way to save money, but whether it best fits you or not is completely your decision. Thoroughly analyze all the pros and cons against your goal and then take the first step. Make the best use of the number of lenders available to provide you with the best solution for your areas of concerns. Good Luck! You can also contact Bruce Mesnekoff an author of The ultimate guide to student loans and CEO of Student Loan Help Center Florida.

Jake flattened the knife against the wall, filling the crevice. It was all he could do to smother a grin. He didn’t know which he’d enjoyed more, spending a couple hours alone with the kids or finding new ways to provoke Meridith. And to think he was getting paid. Maybe once she went back outside, the kids would come down and pretend to play a game at the kitchen bar while they talked. He could hear Meridith talking to them now, asking them about the game they’d supposedly been playing, acting all interested in their activities. If she really cared about them, she wouldn’t be ripping the kids from Summer Place just so she could go back and live happily ever after with her fiancé. And he was pretty sure that’s what she was planning. Their voices grew louder, then Jake saw them all descending the steps. Noelle led the pack, carrying her Uno cards, followed by the boys, then Meridith. Noelle winked on her way past. Little imp. The kids perched at the bar, and he heard the cards being shuffled. Dipping his knife into the mud, Jake sneaked a peek. Meridith was opening the dishwasher. Great. Ben kept turning to look at him, and Jake discreetly shook his head. Even though Meridith faced the other way, no need to be careless. “Noelle, you haven’t said anything about your uncle lately. He hasn’t e-mailed yet?” He felt three pairs of eyes on his back. He hoped Meridith was shelving something. Jake smoothed the mud and turned to gather more, an excuse to appraise the scene. Meridith’s back was turned. He gave the kids a look. “Uh, no, he hasn’t e-mailed.” “Or called or nothing,” Max added. Noelle silently nudged him, and Max gave an exaggerated shrug. What? “Well, let me know when he does. I don’t want to keep pestering you.” “Sure thing,” Noelle said, dealing the cards. Her eyes flickered toward him. “I was thinking we might go for a bike ride this evening,” Meridith said. “Maybe go up to ’Sconset or into town. You all have bikes, right?” “I forgot to tell you,” Noelle said. “I’m going to Lexi’s tonight. I’m spending the night.” “Who’s Lexi?” “A friend from church. You met her mom last week.” A glass clinked as she placed it in the cupboard. “Noelle, I’m not sure how things were . . . before . . . but you have to ask permission for things like this. I don’t even know Lexi, much less her family.” “I know them.” “Have you spent the night before?” “No, but I’ve been to her house tons of times.” He heard a dishwasher rack rolling in, another rolling out, the dishes rattling. “Why don’t we have her family over for dinner one night this week? I could get to know them, and then we’ll see about overnight plans.” “This is ridiculous. They go to our church, and her mom and my mom were friends!” Noelle cast him a look. See? she said with her eyes. Did Meridith think Eva would jeopardize her daughter’s safety? The woman was neurotic. Jake clamped his teeth together before something slipped out. “Just because they go to church doesn’t necessarily make them safe, Noelle. It wouldn’t be responsible to let you spend the night with people I don’t know. You never know what goes on behind closed doors.” “My mom would let me.” The air seemed to vibrate with tension. Jake realized his knife was still, flattened against the wall, and he reached for more mud. Noelle was glaring at Meridith, who’d turned, wielding a spatula. Was she going to blow it? To her credit, the woman drew a deep breath, holding her temper. “Maybe Lexi could stay all night with you instead.” “Well, wouldn’t that pose a problem for her family, since they don’t know you?” Despite his irritation with Meridith, Jake’s lips twitched. Score one for Noelle. “I suppose that would be up to her family.” He heard Noelle’s cards hit the table, her chair screech across the floor as she stood. “Never mind.” She cast Meridith one final glare, then exited through the back door, closing it with a hearty slam.

Wage Garnishment Majority of students complete their education with student loan debt. Once you have graduated from college and stepinto the real world, you realize it isn’t as easy as it seemed. Student loan is one of the most difficult loans to repay and it also cannot be discharged into bankruptcy. Thus it has to be repaid!One thing that should always be kept in mind is to never skip your loan payments. If this happens and happens consecutively for months it will open doors to many other problems. It will put your loan in default; your entire loan amount and interest will become due immediately. It will adversely impact your credit score. We discuss Wage Garnishment with The Student Loan Help Center team, let’s see what they said about it. So What is wage garnishment? Wage garnishment happens when your loan is in default (you can consult The Student Loan help center if you want) i.e you have not paid the loan for consecutive 270 days. Now Wage garnishment is one of the legal consequences of going into default. Through this method the government starts deducting 15% of your income. That means you in hand income willreduce with only 85% coming in your bank account. However the amount of wage that can be garnished for private loandiffers from state to state since every state is not allowed to garnish the wages. How to avoid? As discussed before, wage garnishment happens only when your loan is in default. The department of education sends you one letter when you are in default. The best way to avoid this problem is to avoid going to default. There are numerous measures you can adopt right from very beginning to keep your loan repayment on track. For eg, starting to pay interest in your grace period, automating the process of monthly payments to get some discount from bank etc. Now what if you are in default or going in default, then the best option would be to consider forbearance or deferment which will stop your wages from being garnished. How can it be challenged? If you have just received the notice from Department of Education then you are given one opportunity to get a hearing and object to wage garnishment. You can challenge wage garnishment on following grounds: Your income Your employment Procedures followed to start the garnishment etc Also your wage garnishment cannot begin before the notice of 30 days. During this time period you request a hearing garnishment will be put on hold and if 30 days are over garnishment will not stop if you have won the hearing. One of the Best Student Loan consolidation services in USA is The Student Loan Help Center in Florida for all kind of Student Loan consultation you can contact any time.

What’s different here is the focus on the proxy when far more relevant data is available. I cannot imagine a more meaningful piece of data for auto insurers than a drunk driving record. It is evidence of risk in precisely the domain they’re attempting to predict. It’s far better than other proxies they consider, such as a high school student’s grade point average. Yet it can count far less in their formula than a score drawn from financial data thrown together on a credit report (which, as we’ve seen, is sometimes erroneous).

Credit Repair Companies feed off your frustrations, and your funds!!! - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

The people who establish the laws, acts, and regulations already did the tedious work; the rest of the process is just putting the “Credit Acts into Action.” - The Credit Repair Book: The Credit Repair Company's Secret Weapon.

In God's economy, you may even harvest a crop in places where you didn't plant seed. When you're generous, you will be blessed, whether it comes to you materially, spiritually, emotionally, relationally, or some other way. God obviously cares much more about what happens in our hearts than what happens in our bank accounts, more about our attitudes than our credit scores. Giving generously changes you. It frees you up, undermines the power that money and possessions can have over you, and it makes you more like Him.

Dean Foust and Aaron Pressman, “Credit Scores Not-So-Magic Numbers,” BusinessWeek, February 18, 2008, 33.

Think of your credit score as a very primitive version of what we will see in the coming Reputation Economy; if your credit score is like a traditional landline telephone handset, then future reputation scores will be like the newest iPhone.

Employers, for example, are increasingly using credit scores to evaluate potential hires. Those who pay their bills promptly, the thinking goes, are more likely to show up to work on time and follow the rules.

of Markov chain analysis.4

Rebuilding your credit can take a while, especially if you have some missteps that are currently keeping it out of the excellent range. Don’t sweat it too much. Time heals all wounds; it can also do wonders for your credit score.

You ever choked? You know what I mean, fumbled at the goal line, stuck your foot in your mouth when you were trying to ask that girl on a date, had a brain freeze on the final exam you were totally prepared for, lipped out a three-foot putt to win the golf tournament, or been paralyzed by the feeling of “Oh my god life can’t get any better, do I really deserve this?” I have. What happens when we get that feeling? We clench up, get short of breath, self-conscious. We have an out-of-body experience where we observe ourselves in the third person, no longer present, now not doing well what we are there to do. We become voyeurs of our moment because we let it become bigger than us, and in doing so, we just became less involved in it and more impressed with it. Why does this happen? It happens because when we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves, we then create a fictitious ceiling, a restriction, over the expectations we have of our own performance in that moment. We get tense, we focus on the outcome instead of the activity, and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result, or it’s too good to be true. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t, and it’s not our right to believe it does or is. Don’t create imaginary constraints. A leading role, a blue ribbon, a winning score, a great idea, the love of our life, euphoric bliss, who are we to think we don’t deserve these fortunes when they are in our grasp? Who are we to think we haven’t earned them? If we stay in process, within ourselves, in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at the finish line. Why? Because we aren’t thinking of the finish line, we’re not looking at the clock, we’re not watching ourselves on the Jumbotron performing. We are performing in real time, where the approach is the destination, and there is no goal line because we are never finished. When Bo Jackson scored, he ran over the goal line, through the end zone, and up the tunnel . The greatest snipers and marksmen in the world don’t aim at the target, they aim on the other side of it. When we truly latch on to the fact that we are going to die at some point in time, we have more presence in this one. Reach beyond your grasp, have immortal finish lines, and turn your red light green, because a roof is a man-made thing.

Identifying – and then acquiring – non-performing properties, on which developers can profitably build (or rehab) within neighborhoods which are in the process of being gentrified, has long been cited as one obstacle when it comes to increasing access to affordable housing. Then, once a suitable property has been identified to redevelop, would the developer elect to build affordable housing when homeownership may have been proven to be – historically speaking – difficult to attain for residents who live in neighborhoods where a disproportionately notable portion of potential future home buyers fall within a “very-low” income categorization? “Very low,” meaning, an income at or below 50% of HUD median income. Lower credit scores for prospective home buyers who live in now-underserved neighborhoods could also be one assumption developers have. This would further exacerbate the limited-access-to-quality-affordable-housing challenge.

If your score is 740 or above, you’ll generally qualify for the best programs and the best interest rates. Scores from 700 to 739 are considered what I would call “A-minus,” while scores from 660 to 699 are “average.” If you drop below 660, you’re in subprime territory, and credit scores below 620 make you essentially a non-factor in the credit markets.

Up-front investment to try to professionalize the supply side early on in a network’s development inevitably comes with risk. In a well-publicized misstep for Uber, the company sought to expand its supply side by financing vehicles to provide cars to potential drivers who didn’t own vehicles, a program called XChange Leasing. The hypothesis was that this should push these drivers into power-driver territory quickly. Payments could be automatically deducted from their Uber earnings, and their driver ratings and trip data could be used to underwrite the loans. XChange Leasing unfortunately lost $525 million and failed to professionalize the driver side of the market. The problem was, it attracted drivers highly motivated by money—usually a positive—but who didn’t have high credit scores for good reason. They often failed to make payments, using their Uber-provided car to drive for competitors and avoid the automatic deductions. They would steal the cars and sell them for, say, half price. They would drive for Lyft instead of Uber, as a way to avoid the automatic payment deductions—they would try to have their cake and eat it, too. Uber needed to organize a massive repossession effort to get the cars back, but it was too late—many had been sold illegally, some finding themselves as far away as Iraq and Afghanistan, GPS devices still attached and running. This is a colorful example of how scaling the supply side, when a lot of capital is involved, can be tricky.

Question: “Do you accept the XYZ government assistance program?” Answer (if you don’t want to accept that program): “One of our screening standards requires a minimum monthly income of three times the rent.” Question: “I was evicted three years ago. Is that a problem?” Answer: “One of our screening standards requires good references from all previous landlords for the last five years.” Question: “Do you rent to people with bad credit?” Answer: “One of our screening standards requires a credit score of at least 600.

What does a merchant do when a potential customer walks into a store and wants to purchase a ton of goods on credit? A solution was offered by the “The Society of Guardians for the Protection of Trade against Swindlers and Sharpers,” established in 1776. This society pooled data from 550 merchants to collect information on the reputation of customers. This would make it much harder for a bad customer to defraud multiple merchants. Its key principle: “Every member is bound to communicate to the Society without delay, the Name and Description of any Person who may be unfit to trust.” In other words, this was the beginning of credit scores as a means to assess the trustworthiness of a customer for loans—no swindlers or sharpers allowed. This Society of Guardians was not the only credit bureau—thousands of similar small organizations were formed over the years, collecting individual names and publishing books with various comments and gossip. Modern giants Experian and Equifax grew from these small, local bureaus. Experian started as the Manchester Guardian Society in the early 1800s, eventually acquiring other bureaus to become one of the world’s largest. And Equifax grew from a Tennessee grocery store in the late 1800s, where the owners started compiling their own lists of creditworthy consumers. These bureaus tended to combine into larger bureaus over time because of what’s often described as a “data network effect.” When a bureau works with more merchants, it means more data, which means the risk predictions on loans will be more accurate. This makes it more attractive for additional merchants to join, who contribute even more data, and so on. Being able to accurately assess lending risk allows the rest of the network to function—consumers can borrow to get the goods they want, merchants can sell their products profitably, and banks can help underwrite the loans. This network is held together by credit bureaus like Equifax and Experian, who centralize consumer data.

When they became overwhelmed, Tutu would interrupt their testimony and lead the entire audience in prayer, song, and dance until the witnesses could contain their sobbing and halt their physical collapse. This enabled participants to pendulate in and out of reliving their horror and eventually to find words to describe what had happened to them. I fully credit Tutu and the other member of the commission with averting what might have been an orgy of revenge, as is so common when victims are finally set free.

The primary reason for global currency is that governments whose leaders are focused on global power want full control of currency for ordinary citizens. If the currency is controlled, everything the people spend money on can be controlled. With that, the people can be controlled. China already controls who is permitted to participate in society by using a social credit score system that is based on a person’s behavior. Citizens who obey the Chinese communist government are allowed to participate in society. Those who disobey the government are not permitted to do certain things, such as travel on public transportation or send their children to school.