Slashdot Mirror
TransUnion to Offer Credit Freezes Nationwide
An anonymous reader writes "In a little-noticed press release issued Tuesday, credit reporting bureau TransUnion said it would begin offering credit freezes to all Americans, a change the belies the credit industry's oft-uttered claim that doing so would be too expensive and burdensome. The program takes effect Oct. 15, 2007, will cost $10 each to place and to remove, and request and must be filed by certified mail. As The Washington Post reports, the move comes as some 39 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws entitling their residents to credit freeze rights. The new right may have little benefit unless the other two major credit reporting bureaus follow suit, and both companies are staying mum about any plans to do so. In May, Slashdot examined a related story on the credit bureaus' traditional resistance to freeze laws."
1) I ask to freeze my credit history
2) My history is frozen
3) ???
4) profit
Anybody able to distill this into simple terms for us?
Dominant Meme
You can put a lock on your credit report so that new accounts cannot be opened.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Is that it costs them less than $10 to freeze or unfreeze your credit.
What I'm curious about is the certified mail
It doesn't prove anything about the sender, merely that it got received.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Well, just keep checking for a credit report. And the minute one popped up prior to you wanting one to exist, then freezing it would be a great start. If all the big reporting companies get on board, it would probably be worth your time to do something to get a report with each and then freeze it immediately. You'd be completely safe.
If it gets that way - and it isn't too hard to switch back and forth - I may freeze mine, as I don't need any new credit now, and just unlock it when I need to.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
In the past, prior to applying for a home loan, I had subscribed to credit reporting services at each of the 3 credit reporting agencies. I have had my user accounts set up for over 5 years with each of them. I quit paying for the services once the free AnnualCreditReport.com went up. Now I have been checking my credit annually. Apparently I wasn't the only one who quit paying for services they should be getting for free because they started scamming the consumers.
This year, I went to go pull my report from all 3 bureaus and none of them will let me see it - apparently because they "cannot adequately verify my identity", even though I've logged in with my same account information I've had with them for years. I enter my info; they'll ask me 3 questions about my credit past, which I correctly answer... then tell me I need to send my request via snail-mail.
HOWEVER
If I login and agree to pay $10, then they'll grant me access to the information, no questions asked.
This is a scam!
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
It means that someone, who has an infinitely larger amount of knowledge about that industry than any Slashdotter, has figured out that they can make the same amount of profit off of the same amount of data while still allowing a percentage of their data generating population to entertain a false sense of fairness/security in the system by saying,"Oh, good, I can freeze my credit report with agency XYZ. That solves _EVERYTHING_!"
:)
It's a PR move made by extraordinarily wealthy people trying to shore up their public image.
Simply put all of the conventional wisdom about freezing credit reports, and all of the hyporthetical armchair conjecture about identity thieves, and all of the poster children who pop up in news articles and brochures saying,"I froze my credit and, not only did it save my life, but it walked my dog, buttered my toast, and installed Gentoo for me!" are a decoy. Nobody knows the inner business workings or dealings of the major credit bureaus at the executive level and the credit bureaus, along with the executive level members of the banking institutions which they work with, like it that way. They'll keep offering you bread and circuses ("You can now freeze your credit report" "OMG! That's going to totally revolutionize the economic system and make all of the executive level fraud, insider trading and political graft suddenly disappear!") as long as the American public continues to generate profit and support their multibillion dollar facade.
Truth hurts. Cue the whimpering cries from trolls screaming "where's the evidence!" in agony.
This is a terrible idea unless you are going to purchase your house in full. It is extremely hard to obtain a mortgage with a good rate when you don't have credit. One of my co-workers had this happen to him about a year and a half ago. He needed to use his WOW account as a way to show a consistent monthly payment along with his cell phone bill and some past history with apartments.
It's easy to build good credit if you start early. Just get a credit card with a low limit of say $500. Use it once in a while and pay it off in full every month. You'll have to call your credit card company every so often and fight a little to keep your limit low. But having a good credit score will pay off in the long run.
All three credit agencies allow consumers to request that no new credit be granted. This includes both "instant credit" and new credit card offers. It's a really good idea unless you enjoy kiting your debt between different credit cards.
If you want to change banks, you can always shop for a better rate on-line and then request an account application from the bank you decide best fits your needs. This will probably be a better rate than the unsolicted card offers you get in the mail.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Some states have a law requiring that the credit reporting companies 'thaw' your credit within 15 minutes of you requesting it. For a few bucks, you can thaw, be checked, and refreeze in one day.
Why should a lender trust you to repay the $60K loan - the $100K loan - when you have no history of managing debt on a much smaller scale?
The mortgage market is getting very tight for borrowers who can't demonstrate that they have both the experience and the resources to meet their commitments.
In theory you can get a free credit report from AnnualCreditReport.com, as required by federal law. Not to be confused with freecreditreport.com, which is free for $12.95 a month forever, a scam run by experian. My credit had been hit by an identify thief,and I've been trying to get some false info taken off my experian report. The online site didn't work. Calling the toll free number got me an automated thingy and no way to reach a live operator to explain what I actually needed, so today after a couple of weeks I got the form letter refusing to give me the report I'm entitled to under federal law, so I started calling, to try to reach a live human being.
No live response at the 1-877 number, just loops of answering machines that hung up after awhile.
So I called corporate at 714.830.7000, at 5:29 pm eastern. Operator hung up on me. Called back, same operator, wouldn't tell me her name, wouldn't put me through to a supervisor, kept sending me to an answering machine that after awhile of canned ads hung up on me. Went through this 4 times.
I've been meaning to email tony.hadley@experian.com> vp govt relations
Matthew Besler Public Relations Manager ("flack", not a real manager) Tel: +1 224 698 4415 Email: matthew.besler@experian.com, about this, to ask them why they don't answer their phones,
but I'm lazy and didn't get around to it.
So, experian, are you going to answer your phone next time I call?
People don't care about corporate corruption. Corporate corruption doesn't ruin their lives. Their life savings vanishing and finding themselves in a million dollars of debt 5 years before retirement does.
Your absolutely right about the importance of having a credit history. A short credit history can kill a credit score even without any delinquencies or other negative factors.
I do take issue with the benefit of keeping the credit limit low. A potential lender may see larger limits and take that as a sign that other lenders feel comfortable extending credit to you. This is reflected in how the score is calculated. I use Experian's site regularly because I have free access due to my previous job (employer exposed employee data so they bought us all full access). There is a section where you can modify a number of the factors that affect your credit score and see what your score would be with the modified factors. Raising your limits on your credit cards accounts can improve your score. What will harm your score is having a low total percentage of credit available. For example if you have a balance of $400 on credit cards with a total limit of $500 between your credit cards, you will only have 20% of your credit available. This will negatively affect your credit score. If you have a $10,000 total limit with the same $400 balance, your percent of available credit is close to 100% and your score with be much higher.
these guys are just looking for a new income stream.
Are they taking responsibility for the fact they give you sensitive information which might compromise your identity? No. Instead, they say for $10 per transaction (freeze/unfreeze), you can do it.
Welcome to the new corrupt America where we are all treated like some kind of cash machine, be it from corporations or gov't agencies.
Having good credit can also help lower rates for stuff like car payments (I assume, though I don't have 1st hand knowledge) and insurance (which I do have semi-1st hand knowledge of).
How about giving back my identity and life, and maybe throwing in a free iPhone for kicks? Signed, Joe Blow Consumer
Be sure to tell Mr. Katz how much you enjoy getting bent over by TransUnion.
CONTACT: Steve Katz of TransUnion, +1-312-985-2373,
skatz@transunion.com
From the article:
To place a freeze with TransUnion, consumers will need to submit a request via certified mail, but they will be able to lift it via regular mail or by telephone.
Uh, isn't this backwards? It takes certified mail to issue the stop, but only a phone call to lift it? That's like saying it takes a key, password, and retina scan to shut down your computer but nothing else to turn it on. What's to stop a determined identity thief from lifting the freeze with a phone call?
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
1) Lobby Congress with many millions of dollars over many years so that your industry, an entirely artificial creation of oligopolies over which you have no influence, can fuck up your life with their piss poor security and even random errors in their "system" 2) Watch as consumers get their lives fucked up when bad guys exploit an entirely different but also screwed up monopoly that entered your life and over which you have no control or influence (Windows) 3) Charge people a fee every time they need to "start" and "stop" your "service" to protect them from item 2 4) Profit!
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
"Acceptable forms of payment are American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa."
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
For anyone to lose their entire life savings because of Enron meant that their entire life savings was is one company's stock. This is not sound financial planning.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
- Open several starter accounts. You won't have much credit so you'll be at much lower risk level than someone with a great credit history.
- You build a credit history over a couple years.
- You buy your house.
- You freeze your credit file.
After the freeze, existing accounts would still post monthly reports so you're still going to have a continuous credit history even with a frozen file, if it's done that way. I admit there would still be a window of time where you're vulnerable, but having the freeze is better than what we've had before.By the way, I had always thought the freeze ability was already there because I've heard of this as far back as 10 years ago. It was supposedly possible to get the freeze done at all 3 credit bureaus, but it was difficult and typically used for notable people, such as movie stars and politicians. And, I'm not referring to opting out of pre-screen offers; I explicitly mean a credit file freeze. But, I heard that from 2 money guys on the radio, so not totally sure if they knew what they were talking about.
Camping on quad since 1996.
The whole problem with identity theft and abuse would be so very easy to fix.
1. By law, make it the creditor's problem to prove that charges or credit requests were legitimate.
2. Preemptively invalidate absolutely ALL contract terms, agreements, or otherwise, which shift this burden. Period.
If there were an economic incentive for security, banks would be secure.
Right now, citibank employees will tell you to enter information about your accounts on the web site in "that email" if it has their logo. They don't know what sites are theirs or not. Paypal sends stuff out that comes from "x.com" -- try explaining THAT one to someone who's not aware of their history. Why? Because it's mostly not their problem.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Wow.
The reality is there are people in this world that have money to invest. Some do it by lending money to others that need money for things....houses, cars, buying dinner, whatever. All investing has a certain amount of risk, including lending. Anyone who invests or lends wants to assess and minimize risk. Some might equate low risk with trust. The reality is that even the most trustworthy people have emergencies or personal disasters that result in the inability to pay off debts. Defaulting on loans is nightmare for lenders usually. Don't believe me? Check out some of the many forums where lenders hang out. It doesn't take many bad choices to result in lost money.
In any case, if anyone needs to get a clue, its you.
Personally, I have more debt than most due to years of schooling in addition to the normal stuff. As much as I hate it, I'm thankful I was able to borrow that money to pay for my education for >8 years and still survive. I do consider most of it more of an investment anyway. Now that I have a real job I also invest and lend. There is such a thing as mutually beneficial situations and hopefully a borrower is doing so to benefit themselves and/or their family.
It goes deeper than that. Companies you have credit with will extend you more credit than you think you have (often in the form of higher limits) not just because they like you, but because it can actually lower your credit score by making you more "at risk" for being in debt because you have access to credit.
This helps, say, your credit card issuer because you'll get fewer or less lucrative offers to switch to other cards because you are higher risk, but it also means you might pay a higher interest rate on things you DO want to buy on credit (like a car).
If you can freeze your credit, credit issuers can't silently over-credit you and drive up your cost of credit at the same time.
IMHO, the credit "industry" is a major racket which only appears to be a marketplace; the customers of the credit reporting clearinghouses are the lenders, and the lenders benefit from lower credit ratings and scores by being able to charge higher interest rates. The credit clearinghouses have ZERO incentive to have accurate records, fair correction policies or transparent scoring algorithms; their customer, the lenders, benefit from consumer-unfriendly policies through both higher interest rates and lender-leaning policies that treat borrowers suspiciously.
I don't know, but I've often speculated that the mortgage crisis, which is actually a bad-lending-policy crisis, happened because some renegade lenders figured out several years ago that the clearinghouses were manipulating data against consumers grossly enough that a market was being denied credit generally unfairly. Of course this blossomed into a get-rich-quick real estate bubble, but the technical origins were in our "traditional" credit markets being lender-skewed by the reporting agencies and non-traditional lenders exploiting this gap.
I'd like to see MUCH greater regulation of the reporting agencies, including mandating transparency of records (eg, I get access to everything you share/sell about me in whatever format you package it in), record freezing, banning scoring (force lenders to make decisions based on actual borrowing and payment histories) or at least making the scoring process totally transparent and subject to regulation (ie, queries alone can't lower your score, scoring only based on borrwing and payment histories), requiring a simpler challenge process with the burden of proof greatly shifted to lenders (eg, electronic-only records not in consumers favor MUST be removed if challenges, lenders must provide non-electronic proof of discrepencies, etc).
I'd also like to see credit reporting ONLY available to lenders, not to employers or landlords or anyone else not extending credit trying to judge personality or whatever they use it for.
Its just amazing how little control we have over our credit dossiers and how much influence it has over many details of life. You can get caught raping a 10 year old and win a million dollar settlement if the cop who arrests you even THINKS about smacking you, yet even if you're the best credit consumer in the world you can get dicked over by the credit reporting agencies with only the weakest of "rights" available to you.
Granted, this is just something I recall my mortgage broker saying a year ago (so take with salt as necessary), but I've heard that a critical component of assessing your credit is available credit versus utilized/outstanding debt. Having a higher credit limit (with low utilization) is a good thing-- I think it's thinking along the lines of "if you come into hard times, you can use your available credit to soak up other bills, and still pay us." (Of course, upping your limits just before looking to mortgage does trip fishiness filters.)
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
CONTACT: Steve Katz of TransUnion, +1-312-985-2373,
skatz@transunion.com Katz, eh? He'll just say "All your credit are belong to us."
"You are only young once, but you can be immature forever." -www.animemusicvideos.org
Perhaps because up until this point he has managed to live within his means and not need short term loans to survive. In addition he has manged to save up enough money for a deposit for a house, despite having less money available to him.
I think if he got 10,000 emails saying basically "thanks for the new scam" and it might just raise a few eyebrows at TransUnion.
I've been a proponent for quite some time of an "identity clearinghouse" - an independent government-funded organization to which you could optionally submit your current contact information for the purposes of verifying your identity. Credit offerors (banks, CC companies, etc.) would be required by law to check with the clearinghouse before they could open a line of credit for anybody. The process of signing up for the clearinghouse or of changing one's information would have to be done in person at one's local DMV, where in nearly every state they already have computer photo records of everyone who has a license or ID card.
The clearinghouse would take the lender's verification request, determine whether the purported credit applicant was listed in the database, and if not, they would respond that the person isn't listed. The lender could then open the line of credit. If the applicant is listed, then the clearinghouse attempts to contact the applicant using the contact information on record to verify the request, first by phone, then by mail (the applicant could also request only to be contacted by mail, or could request that all verifications be denied until further notice). If the applicant verifies the credit request, then the lender is notified with a simple "yes" and can then open the line of credit. Otherwise, the lender is notified with "no" and is forbidden from offering credit under that application.
Any lender found to have opened a line of credit for a person who refused to verify a credit request would become fully liable for that line of credit. The reporting agencies would be required to remove the credit line from the person's records. Any legal costs incurred would also become the lender's responsibility.
The system would be funded via a fee charged for every verification request.
This wouldn't solve all identity theft problems. For example, if someone steals your credit card, you're still on the hook (at least as much as your credit card issuer doesn't cover). It wouldn't necessarily cover interception of one's mail. But it would make mass ripoffs of PII useless.
100,000 emails with "Eh..." in them would do more.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Well, what will go into the model will be things like: income, length of employment, other open trade lines(loans/credit cards). If you have several years of employment, decent income with no debt, you won't have any problem. But it wouldn't hurt to have had a credit card that you paid off to zero every month.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
what about half of the life savings. Or third of it? Would it do? This still can push you over the border to poverty even if not immediately. Unless of course you will decide to take justice into your own hands and spend the remaining parts of your life in federal prison for murder then you will not live in poverty. Choice is yours.
Long term, he'll have had more money available to him, as he hasn't been paying interest on his expenditure.
I have one of those, Experian has no knowledge of it, so it doesn't help one bit. Some banks only share details of defaults with credit agencies, at least in the UK.
The way the US loan system works has always seemed absurd to me: it's easier to get a loan if you have always been in debt than if you have always have a clean debt-free life. Doesn't make any sense.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
My husband and I are disabled, and until a few years ago were not able to get on top of our bills. During the years leading up to my husband's disability declaration (I was denied), our credit had gradually fallen, with no way to recover. Today we're doing better, but our credit is still hosed. We'd like to pay off those old debts and fix our credit, but according to someone in the credit industry whom I spoke with about a week ago, even if we could pay them off, there would be no point because the debts are too *old* to matter! All that paying them would do is remove certain 'flags' from our credit reports. The debts would remain listed (as "paid") and it would most certainly NOT improve our Beacon scores, he says. To raise that score, we were told, we have to find some way to get a line of credit from someone who reports to the credit agencies, and few companies (if any) want to give anyone a line of credit if their score is too low.
It's the ultimate catch-22. Basically, to get a line of credit, you have to fix your credit first, and to fix your credit, you have to get a line of credit first. So if for any reason, your credit drops below a certain score, you're too much of a 'risk' for further credit, and you're fucked for the rest of your life if you're disabled, unless you're particularly lucky anyway.
It's as though your worth as a human being has been distilled down to a single, three-digit number, and it is truly disgusting that we-the-people allow this kind of crap.
It seems to me that a credit freeze is similar to the system administrators' principle that you don't leave running services that you don't need. If you get no benefit from a service, why accept the risk that it poses, even if that risk is very small? Similarly, if you don't need credit, why make it even possible for someone else to get credit in your name?
Here in the UK, someone by the name of Jamie Jamieson came up with a way to exploit a UK law that says that everyone has a right to place a "Notice of Correction" in their credit report, which lenders must take into account when they assess your credit. Full details are given at http://www.freeidprotection.co.uk/ but in short, you send the three UK credit agencies a notice of correction stating that any application for credit by you will be accompanied by your thumbprint, and that any application not accompanied by your thumbprint should be considered fraudulent.
It's important to note that the credit agency is not expected to verify that the thumbprint is yours. But most fraudsters would not know in advance that a thumbprint would be necessary, and certainly would not want to supply their own...
I have no idea whether this would work in the USA.
This is just a ploy to stop more states from passing freeze laws. In Ohio, they wanted $10 with the proposed freeze law. Everyone is screaming that's too much and to make it $2 or free.
They really need sued.
I really think you should educate yourself. Maybe then you wouldn't say such stupid and offensive things. There are about 2 dozen books written about the Enron collapse but if you can't be bothered to actually READ you should at least pick up the Documentary Enron: The smartest guys in the room.
First, there was a lot of corporate pressure for Employees to invest all their 401k allocation in company stock. This was pushed by the HR department as well as the C-level managers at corporate pep rallies. Second, Enron stock was GOING THRU THE ROOF. It was EXPLODING. You're sitting there, in the middle of the 90s boom, and you're seeing your co-workers dumping the max federal limit into their 401k's, every dime of it into company stock, you see the internal view of the company, flush with cash and growing like crazy, and you see those co-workers becoming MILLIONAIRES before your eyes. So you invest your 401k into Enron stock and get your boarding pass to the gravy train.
Still, I can level with you that personal greed (however understandable) is what put them in that position. However, there's a whole lot of people who never really had a choice. PG&E was bought on the cheap and integrated them with the rest of the Enron West Cost energy assets. PG&E had an internal stock ownership program: employees were granted shares of the company. Lifelong employees had loads of stock in a company that had been local, with a solid business, for decades. This was their nest egg.
When Enron bought them, they swapped PG&E shares for Enron shares. No doubt many of these employees were excited to see that, considering how Enrons stock was still going strong. But these are people who never really had a choice. They lost everything. And the very worst part of that story is that a Federal Bankruptcy Judge injuncted those employees from selling the stock. Enrons share price didn't collapse overnight. It took some time to unpeel that onion. At the same time, executives like Lou Pai were selling millions (even Hundreds of Millions) of dollars in Enron stock, these poor bastards who worked 40 years as linemen or plant operators were forced to just sit by and watch the stock price plunge.
This was an absolute tragedy. These people were just bent over and fucked over and over by the company AND the government. You really should educate yourself before you speak.
Good for him. Too bad the credit agencies don't agree.
It's really not that absurd. If you've demonstrated that you keep yourself out of debt, how can a lender make money off of you? That's the biggest issue. Lenders aren't charities (in general), and they don't make money if you don't go into debt.
Another issue is verifying that if I lend you a bunch of cash, you will give me the money back at some point. If you've never handled a bunch of cash someone else gave you, how can I trust you'll be good with mine?
What's more perplexing to me is that I've only had two lines of credit where I couldn't pay off the principle before any interest was due (a school loan which was still paid off quickly and a mortgage). Every thing else I've paid off before a penny of interest was due. In my eyes, this makes me a really lousy credit customer. The only way they make money off of me is from the transaction fees they charge stores when I use my credit. Yet, any time I've decided to open a new line of credit, I've never had a problem. Despite the fact that in all probability, they're barely going to make any money off of me (if any).
On a manual review, maybe -- but the FICO scoring algorithm rewards maintenance of huge limits with low utilization. A person is better off with a $2,000 debt against a $20,000 credit limit than with $200 in debt against a $500 limit, all other things being equal.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
And why do their life savings vanish? What's the leading cause? [rim shot] CORPORATE CORRUPTION!!! You're welcome for letting me school you. HAND.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Non-Linux Penguins ?
So now Americans have to PAY in order to NOT receive an UNWANTED service.
If ever there ever was a business model that is sure to be profitable, this one is a winner.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Why should a lender trust you to repay the $60K loan - the $100K loan - when you have no history of managing debt on a much smaller scale?
At the moment in the UK it's over $300K for a 1 bed flat within an hour of London, $500K for one in London. Even if you somehow manage a 10% deposit ($30K)
There is a house price crash coming, although even then a London flat will still be need well over $200K for a mortgage.
There is, they're just being less obnoxious, and Europeans aren't as obsessed with spending more money than they have than Americans. For example the SCHUFA in Germany.
Well truth be told he's not the only one, or maybe I'm your coworker :) I bought my place a little under a year ago. It is smart to have a low limit credit card, kept up to date. You also want to make sure you pay all your bills on time. If you do not have a credit history you will have to provide credit reference letters from electricity, phone, rent, etc that say how often you pay online. WoW accounts work because it is a monthly bill that gets paid on time :)
I'm in a state where many insurance companies used creidt scores to adjust rates. (This is banned in some states.) What if the insurance company cannot longer read these? set to the highest rate then?
I personally know of banks that have refused to extend credit, or even consider applications, when they see a flurry of recent inquiry activity. They'll look for every loophole to deny credit to anyone they feel "is shopping around for credit."
This inquiry history has no bearing on your true credit history and should not be kept at all since it can only hurt the consumer! Obviously this is something that makes the credit report more interesting to those making inquires and creating additional entries in this inquiry history field in the process, but it screws the borrower over royally!
Yes I am upset about this practice, and never hear it discussed!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It was true when prices were going up, but not now since prices are going down.
Which is why they'll likely make it much harder to get loans for high-risk borrowers.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
They even have 4th mortgages now. How soon before someone offers a 5th mortgage? Or is that illegal?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Me too... but this is just called a "Fraud Alert" - which I have on all three credit bureaus. A freeze is a different kind of animal. A Fraud Alert causes a response by the credit bureau for you to call and verify the request is being made with your authorization. A Freeze on the other hand causes NO response.
For anyone to lose their entire life savings because of Enron meant that their entire life savings was is one company's stock. This is not sound financial planning.
Aside from the slight exaggeration of the entire life savings, part of the Enron scandal was the employees got royally shafted due to their 401ks all being in the company stock. The higher ups dumped their stocks early when they knew things were going south, but the regular folks were left high and dry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal#Pensions
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Identity theft?...
That is one possibility, but the people who study these things and have strong incentives (money) to get it right show that the larger credit limit implies improved the likelihood of not defaulting. That's just how it is.
Theoretically that could work. Problem is, income does not equal fiscal responsibility and is not as reliable an indicator of long term ability to pay off debt.
You do not necessarily need to be in debt to have a credit history. Using a credit card to make routine purchases and paying it off completely each month is not what I would consider debt. Just because there are people who don't get the system and spend beyond their means, thus ruining their credit, doesn't mean its a flawed system. Personally, I think its more of a failure of families to educate their kids and the education system for failing to focus more of personal finance and math.
geek friendly VPS's and free API enabled DNS : zerigo.com
Residents have always had credit freeze rights. This law doesn't grant any new rights to anyone. It takes away the right of credit reporting bureaus to abstain from providing credit freeze services. I'm agnostic in my judgment of this move, but please don't obfuscate the meaning of "right" in the political context. I have the right to a trip to Disneyland, and Disneyland has the right to deny me admission if I don't buy a ticket. If Government passed a law making admission to Disneyland free, it wouldn't be granting me a right, but removing one from Disneyland (or more accurately, from the owners of Disneyland--the right to charge admission to enter their property).
An unexpected health crisis us one of the leading causes of bankruptcy.
I don't know exact numerics, because Fair Issac keeps those close to the vest. But with the utilization you have on your cards, you're looking very good. There's a decent article about the credit scoring system here.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
"Don't put all your eggs in one basket" may be a cliche, but that's primarily because it's fairly sound advice.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?