Good Time to File Bankruptcy

One of the things that trips many bankruptcy filers up, even after speaking with a bankruptcy attorney, is that the bankruptcy court will take 40 percent of your unpaid earnings. If you get paid once per month, this can be a very big deal. For example, if you get paid on the 30th of each month and you file your bankruptcy petition with the court on the 28th, you will have to pay almost half the amount of your pay check to the bankruptcy trustee. In a case like this, you would be much better off waiting the following month to file for bankruptcy.

However, there is a catch. You don’t want to file too soon after being paid because the other thing that the bankruptcy court is entitled to is almost all of the cash in your bank accounts on the day you file. For example, if you got paid $3,000 on the 30th and then you filed your bankruptcy petition on the 1st and there was $2,900 left in your bank account, you’ll have to pay that $2,900 to the trustee, even if you have long since spent it since you filed. Don’t forget, the numbers that matter are the ones that exist on the day you file.

Which brings us to the next issue in bankruptcy filing timing. Spend your money before you file. Be careful HOW you spend your money. Buying “things” like jewelry or other items is a very bad idea. The court can ask you to forfeit those items, especially if you bought them close to the filing date or if those items exceed the amount of allowable bankruptcy exemptions in your state. However, buying groceries, filling prescriptions and making sure your gas tank is full are very good ways to spend your money down before filing bankruptcy. No one can complain that you want to eat and stay healthy. More to the point, there is really no way to ask you to forfeit food, gas, and medicines.

Be very sure you understand that the amount in your account on the day you file is what matters, not when you spent the money. For example, if you write a check for $200 worth of groceries on the 8th, file bankruptcy on the 9th and the check clears on the 10th, the amount of money that counts against you for the purposes of asset counting in your bankruptcy is the amount in your checking account on the 9th, which includes the $250 you already spent. For this reason, it can be useful to withdraw cash. However, large cash withdrawals right before filing can be suspicious. Keep all your receipts to prove that you spent that money on necessities. You can also use your checking account debit card instead. Debit card transactions often clear in 24 hours, so you just have to wait one day. However, be careful of weekends and bank holidays when transactions may be delayed in reporting. You can also simply time your filing for a time after your checks and debit card transactions have cleared.

If you file anytime between December and April, don’t be surprised if your bankruptcy trustee keeps your case open long enough to take any tax refund you are getting. Don’t try spending your refund right before filing either, that usually won’t fly. Either adjust your withholding to avoid a refund (late in the year). If you still owe taxes from the previous year, this doesn’t apply to you. The IRS will intercept any refund before it ever goes to you and apply it to your outstanding taxes, before the court can lay any claim to it. This works in your favor since most federal income taxes cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Pay Bills Before Bankruptcy

It doesn’t make sense to pay bills due on credit cards before filing. Those debts, including any late fees, will be wiped out in the discharge. As far as your credit score goes, bankruptcy is bankruptcy. Your credit report won’t look any better if you have slightly lower balances on your credit cards before you file. You might want to take a look at your credit score before you file. To avoid having to pay, get a free credit score from CreditKarma.com. (See my Credit Karma scam article and my CreditKarma.com review article for more details.) You may, however, want to wait to sign up for Credit Karma free credit monitoring. You’ll just get a lot of depressing emails as everyone reports your bankruptcy and charge offs.

While it is not smart to pay bills like credit card bills, it is very smart to pay utilities and other bills. Paying those bills takes money out of your accounts in a way that cannot be reclaimed by the bankruptcy courts. So, in our example above, the best time to file for bankruptcy is soon after you get paid, but not until you have paid your electric bill, cable bill, cell phone bills, kid’s tuition or day care fees, and so on. Each of those things will reduce the amount of cash you have to report without raising any white flags. In order to keep the amount of unpaid earnings you have to pay to the court low, pay those bills in advance so that you can file soon after you get your paycheck before more unpaid earnings build up.

Grab the FinanceGourmet Feed to keep up to date on our series of bankruptcy filing help articles as well as our other personal finance tips.

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Best Time to File Bankruptcy originally published at Finance Gourmet

Credit Monitoring Scam

This year, Credit Karma is offering it’s registered users something new. They are expanding beyond their flagship service of offering to show users a free credit score and moving into to offering free credit report monitoring.

One of the biggest financial scams in America comes courtesy of the credit reporting industry and the three major credit reporting bureaus. In class Mafia-style extortion, a tough looking guy visits a local business. He says that bad things might happen to his business. In order to be safe, he should pay for “protection.” Of course, the only protection the business needs is from the crooks offering the protection. Credit reports and credit report monitoring work the same way.

The credit bureau’s extortion scheme works exactly the same way. You see, bad things might happen to your credit report. Someone might put false, damaging information in your file. The “smart” thing to do is to check your credit report often. To do that, you have to pay your protection money for a credit monitoring service so that you can be informed when negative information goes on your credit report. Of course, the only thing you need “protection” from is the credit bureaus and their lackadaisical efforts to ensure that only accurate information is on your credit report. Not surprisingly, Transunion, Experian and Equifax all gladly offer high-priced credit monitoring protection.

Unfortunately, just like the Mafia, the credit bureaus aren’t satisfied with just extorting a one-time fee. Instead, they use every trick in the book to get suckers customers to sign up for automatically renewing subscriptions that will charge your credit card or debit your bank account for life, all to “protect” you.

Free Credit Monitoring from CreditKarma.com

Credit Karma is offering it’s users a new option. Once signed up for Credit Karma, users can opt-in to a free credit report monitoring service. Every time negative information shows up on your credit report, Credit Karma will send an email alert. Unfortunately, at that point, the only thing you can do is order a copy of your credit report from the credit bureaus. If you are lucky, then you can get your government mandated free annual credit report.

If you already looked at in the past year, however, you will have to pay money in order to get your report, get bombarded with offers for free-trials that are actually auto-renewing subscriptions to expensive services, and then find the negative credit info in your report. Credit Karma has nothing to do with that part of the industry and it certainly isn’t their fault. Hopefully, the trend toward more accessible free credit information will continue. In the meantime, the credit industries high-paid lobbyists will ensure that other than that one free report each year, that you pay through the nose to keep financial companies from lying about you.

Fortunately, Credit Karma allows you the piece of mind of not having to pay every month, or every year, for a credit report monitoring subscription. By checking your free credit score number regularly and signing up for the CreditKarma.com free credit report alerts, you should be able to detect when something is going wrong. You’ll have to pay to find out exactly what and then to fix it, but at least you won’t be wasting money buying credit reports or paying fees when there are no issues with your credit.

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1. Credit Karma Review
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Credit Karma Review Free Credit Monitoring originally published at Finance Gourmet

Update: Now CreditKarma.com offers free credit report monitoring. Check out the Credit Karma review of free credit monitoring service.

Credit scores are confusing to many people. This is not the result of ignorance or being naive. Credit scores are not consumer products. They were (are) meant to be used by financial institutions. These lenders are the ones who pay for the credit scores. Banks and lenders are credit score customers, not the people who are being scored.

Credit scores are not a free, open system. Rather, they are a product, sold by Fair Issac. They charge money for each credit score calculated. Fair Issac’s customers are banks, mortgage companies, and other lenders, not you. In fact, a quick look around the Fair Issac website should show you that this is not a company concerned about selling products or services to individuals as customers.

Fair Issac has a separate website and separate company face called MyFico that deals with regular people instead of lending institutions. MyFico will gladly sell you your credit score, or charge your for credit monitoring. But, make no mistake, this is an additional revenue stream for the company, NOT its core business.

Credit Score Versus Credit Report

Making things even more confusing, credit scores are calculated from credit reports. Fair Issac does not have credit reports. They use credit reports from the three major credit reporting bureaus, Experian, Transunion, and Equifax.

Experian, Equifax, and Transunion do not make credit scores. More specifically, credit bureaus do not make FICO credit scores. They don’t like missing out on all the money generated from credit scores, so they made up their own credit score, but nobody uses it. Whenever someone is talking about your “real credit score” they mean a FICO score from Fair Issac, not one of the new credit scores from Transunion, Experian or Equifax.

Different Types of FICO Scores

If that weren’t confusing enough, there are more layers of confusion. There is not just one FICO score.

Fair Issac sells more than one kind of credit score. However, each credit score is called a FICO score. That means that even if you get your FICO score, you might not have your “real credit score” which is one of many different FICO scores available.

The different FICO scores rank different things in your credit report, different ways. What makes a person more or less likely to repay a car loan, for example, differs from what makes a person more or less likely to repay a mortgage home loan. Thus, different scores. A car dealer wants the FICO score for car loans, a mortgage company wants the FICO score for mortgages.

Even if your mortgage guy or your car finance guy shows you your actual credit score that they used for a loan, it will still be different from the one based on the other two credit reports and different from the other types of FICO scores.

In other words, there is no one “real” credit score.

How Do I Get My Real Credit Score For Free?

In a recent review of CreditKarma.com we showed you how to get your credit score for free. As far as I know, Credit Karma is the only way to get a free credit score online without having to sign up for a trial offer or buy something else.

The free credit scores from CreditKarma are real credit scores. However, you have to remember all of the information above.

1. Credit scores from CreditKarma.com are based on one of three possible credit reports. All three possible scores are “real scores”, but a lender might buy a credit score based on one of the other two credit reports.
2. Credit scores can change daily. If you get a score on Monday, and a bank reports a late payment on Tuesday, then the credit score you get on Wednesday will be different (lower). The credit score you got on Monday is your real credit score FOR MONDAY. Your credit score for any other day can be higher or lower.
3. There are different kinds of FICO scores. The one you get from Credit Karma is not one of them.

After looking into it to find out if Credit Karma is a scam I feel comfortable recommending it to readers as a good way to get a credit score for free without getting ripped off. There are ads on the website and they might send you emails, although I have only gotten monthly ones that say my credit score may have changed. Getting your credit score online from CreditKarma won’t make anything less confusing, but you can see if it’s moving up or down and do something if necessary.

Otherwise, there isn’t much you can do about trying to get an “exact” number. If you are close to a credit score number you need for a loan, you can improve your credit score but it takes time. Keep making all of your payments on time. If you have the resources, pay down some balances to lower your credit utilization ratio. Then wait. There isn’t much more you can do.

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Real Credit Score or Fake Credit Score originally published at Finance Gourmet

Update: There is now an opt-in service for Credit Karma credit monitoring as a free additional service.

There are multiple reasons for this line of thinking, but the main one is that credit scores are not free.

Credit scores are not free for you, they are not free for banks, they are not free for car dealers, they are not free for anyone. Credit scores are the “why didn’t I think of that” invention of the century where personal lending is concerned.

A company called Fair Isaacs takes information from the credit reports at any of the three major credit bureaus and then uses a proprietary algorithm to reduce dozens of pages or more into one single number called a credit score. It does not do this for free. Every time someone pulls your credit score, they pay. They may pay a lot or they may pay a little depending upon their agreement with Fair Issac, but they do pay. You can’t give something that costs you money for free unless you have another way to make more money than you are paying out.

Credit Karma Review of Free Credit Score

Since most free credit score scams are actually free trial offers that lead to an automatic recurring charge on your credit card, I figured that Credit Karma would want a credit card number before giving me my credit score. I know how to beat automatic charges on my credit cards, so I thought I would go through the process anyway and find out for sure whether or not Credit Karma was a scam.

The surprising thing was that Credit Karma never asked me to enter a credit card number!

As you may recall, I had generated a limited use credit card number to enter, but I didn’t need it. Credit Karma asked for a lot of personal information, but never asked me to enter a credit card number nor any bank account information. In other words, Credit Karma has no way to charge me for my credit score. It’s tough to scam someone when you don’t get any money from them.

That begs the question, is the credit score from Credit-Karma a real credit score? Another credit score offering out there are calculators that “estimate” your credit score for you. The catch is that they estimate your credit score based upon the information that you provide. Chances are that there is no way you are going to enter all of the information that exists in your credit report, so it is not a very accurate estimate, no matter how good the credit score calculator program itself is.

That didn’t happen with CreditKarma.com either. Instead of asking me for my financial account information, they asked me for the same type of personal information anyone would need to pull a credit report and get a credit score on me. This does include your social security number and there is no way around that, so at a certain level, you have to trust that the Credit Karma website is legit. So far, I haven’t heard of any rumblings that this is all a very elaborate identity theft scam, although that is no guarantee of anything.

Credit Karma Complaints

The number one Credit Karma complaint is that the credit score is not a real FICO score. However, it is based upon your actual credit report data.

As it turns out, I was buying my car off of its expiring lease when I discovered Credit Karma, so I was able to compare the score CreditKarma.com said I had with the one my auto broker pulled in order to do my car loan paper work. The scores were close enough to be considered identical. (Scores actually very depending upon which credit bureau is used and even from day to day depending upon new information being reporting and aging of old information, but in this case they were within 4 points of each other.)

Now what would make Credit Karma the must have personal finance service for financially savvy people is that it does not just offer you your credit score for free once, but says that you can come back and update it as often as you like. I don’t know if there is a limit on how many times you can update, but I updated my free credit score from Credit Karma every month since May with no complaints.

In other words, I have gotten six free credit scores from CreditKarma.com without paying a cent, without buying anything, and without clicking on any advertisements. There are advertisements on the page, but unless they are the kind that pay just for showing up, CreditKarma has earned nothing from me other than thanks and this review.

I recently setup an account for my wife (spouses can have very different credit scores even if “everything” is held jointly) and have started getting her free credit score as well.

I can’t say that I expect Credit Karma to be in business long. I doubt that it can earn enough money on what it is doing to make a profit. It might even get shut down by Fair Issac somehow since they don’t want people thinking of its flagship product as “free”.  If Credit Karma does succeed, then it won’t be long before copycats are all over the Internet. But, no matter how it turns out down the road, for now, Credit Karma is a great deal for people managing their money.

Related posts:

1. Credit Karma Review Free Credit Monitoring
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Credit Karma Review originally published at Finance Gourmet

How do I know?

One good piece of financial advice that I frequently give is to use phony names when signing up for certain things, especially promotional offers and magazine subscriptions. The reason is that these companies like to turn around and sell your name and address to other companies that then send you plenty of junk mail. These mailing lists can be more profitable than the actual business of writing a magazine or newsletter!

Nothing helps sort out a real “Urgent! Response Required,” mailing from a phony one like seeing one of the fake names that you used to sign up for something in the past. Just like the one that appears on my no annual fee Capital One No Hassle Rewards World MasterCard offer that came to my house under a name used for magazine subscriptions. Since that isn’t even a real person, let alone someone with a high credit score, we know that these offers are either going out blind, or people with low credit scores can qualify for these credit cards.

Capital One Miles Rewards

This particularly Capital One MasterCard looks like it comes with the standard NoHassle miles reward chart and earning points follows the basic Capital One miles rewards earning plan. You get 1 mile for each $1 you spend. The miles do not expire and there is no limit to the number of miles you can earn with the credit card.

A  bonus rewards points offer comes in the form of 30,000 bonus rewards miles comes with plenty of fine print. You actually get a 10,000 mile bonus reward with your first purchase. Then, if you spend at least $3,000 per year on the card, you get another 10,000 NoHassle miles reward bonus on your first anniversary and then 10,000 more No Hassle bonus miles on the second anniversary. So it might be a while before you want to use that Capital One Rewards Catalog to pick your free reward.

Also, there is no annual fee and this is a credit card with 0% interest rate APR on purchases until February 2011. After that, the regular interest rate is 17.99%, but that is not a fixed interest rate. Instead, this MasterCard from Capital One comes with a variable APR. The variable interest rate is calculated as PRIME + 14.74%. OUCH!

Folks, pay attention to these rates from banks on your credit card offers. 17.99% is not a low interest rate by any stretch of the imagination, but when the PRIME rate climbs to a measly 5%, which is still very low, by the way, this card will have an interest rate of 19.74%. That’s 20% interest on a credit card. No amount of miles is worth that.

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Capital One World MasterCard No Hassle Rewards Miles originally published at Finance Gourmet

$90 per year

The myFICO service that allows you to check your credit score daily costs approximately $90 per year.  Just do some quick math.  I see people transfer their money all over the place to pick up an extra 0.5% on their savings or money market account.  Instead of transferring your money and setting up direct deposit and whatever other gymnastics are required, you might want to consider how you could end up with the same net worth.  That $90 per year adds up to the same amount as the total extra interest you would earn in an entire year on $18,000 in savings by getting a interest rate that is 0.5% better.

Easy Way to Get A Free Credit Score

Update (January 2012): You should see about this CreditKarma.com free credit monitoring review along with your free credit score. See my CreditKarma.com review for a complete look of Credit Karma. Also check this if you are worried about the whole thing being just a Credit Karma scam.

First, see if your financial institution will tell you your credit score for free.  Some forward thinking customer focused banks and credit unions are actively reporting their customer’s FICO score on statements or on your online banking.  Typically, these scores are updated quarterly.  Even if your bank doesn’t print your score out somewhere, that doesn’t mean that they won’t tell you if you ask.  Call the regular customer service number and ask if they have a recent credit score for you on file.  Chances are they do.  Many financial institutions update your credit score on a quarterly or semi-annual basis so that they can target you with the right kinds of services.  After all, a customer with a 780 credit score is someone you don’t have to worry about bouncing a lot of checks or or over-running a credit-line.  When you talk to them, get your score and the date it was from.  There you go, free credit score.

If your bank won’t tell you your credit score, frankly, I’d start looking for another bank.  Even saying the words, “Oh, well, that’s unfortunate because a friend of mine can always ask his bank.  Maybe I should switch,” might get you bumped up to a different level of service, and your file noted so that you can get your score next quarter.

How to Manage Your Credit Score

Knowing your credit score number is not as important as what you are doing to it.  Think about it this way, if a highly calibrated NASA scale says you weigh 197 lbs. does it really matter that your home scale says 194 lbs?  What matters is whether the number is going up or down.  While it is true that the exact number may determine your lending rate, you don’t know what those numbers will be.  Some lenders will give you the best rate with a 715, others may require a 730.  So, while it helps to know about what your credit score is, don’t obsess over the exact number.

So, how do you make sure your credit score keeps going up?  Pay every bill, every month, on time.  That’s it!

The only other time you even have to worry about it, is when you get different credit than you already have.  That is, if you get a new credit card or refinance your house, or trade in your car for another.  Then, it’s time to call the bank again and find out what your score it.  You’ll need to wait a month or two before the change takes affect, but it doesn’t hurt to call right away.  Then, you can ask if they know when it will be updated by their system again.

There you go.  Absolutely FREE CREDIT SCORE management, no strings attached.

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Is myFICO Worth It? originally published at Finance Gourmet

One of my benefits was the right to join a Credit Union. Back in those days credit unions were a little bit tighter in their membership requirements, still it wasn’t too hard to join one. But, since it was one of my benefits, I marched down right away and opened an account. It wouldn’t be until years later that I would understand that the reason my company offered me this benefit was because the [tag]credit union[/tag] offered me another benefit which was the ability to have direct deposit. Companies like direct deposit because it saves them from processing checks and credit unions and banks like direct deposit for the same reason, plus it is a pseudo-guarantee that you will have money in your account which they like as well.

Luckily for me, my benefit took me to [tag]Bellco Credit Union[/tag]. Bellco Credit Union was formerly the credit union for Mountain Bell employees, hence the name (Bell-co). It turns out that Bellco (as it is known locally) is one of the best credit unions around in Colorado. So, even as I became more financially savvy, I stayed a Bellco customer and have been for many years now. In the last year or two I’ve moved a lot of my stuff to Online Banks because of the better rates (ING Direct, and WAMU, but I’m still not sold on WAMU — I heartily recommend ING Direct). Recently, I logged on to my Bellco online account to find this:

If you can’t read it, the second tab there says Credit Score. I’ve been doing online banking for several years now and have never seen that before. Curious, I clicked on it expecting to get some sort of sales pitch for a $9.99/month credit monitoring service. Instead, I got this:

No sales pitch, nothing shifty, just my [tag]FICO[/tag] number [tag]credit score[/tag]: 755, which is up some from the last time I checked. How awesome is this? A free credit score from my credit union. Not for signing up for anything, but just because they have it and they might as well tell me what it is. (Most banks and credit unions, as well as most credit companies, pull your credit on a regular basis to keep up with your current situation. That way, it isn’t a surprise when you show up bankrupt some day, and also so that they know whether or not they want to notify you of some new services or features they have.)

Now, the nit-picking natters of finance will show up and claim that this isn’t my “real” credit score. Most people don’t know this, but you can actually get several different credit scores which will weight things differently. So, a “real” credit score is usually the on you use to get a mortgage and most people mean this one when they talk about your FICO score. But, there are also ones that weight your credit card history higher which are used primarily by the banking industry and credit card companies. Some people refer to this score as a FAKKO or FAKE-O score. The truth is it doesn’t matter.

Think of it this way. You have a scale in your house. When you get on it, it says that you weigh 195 lbs. Does it matter if this is your “real” weight? If a scale at NASA says that you actually weight 203 lbs. does this matter at all even though the number is off? It depends on what you are doing with the number. If you plan to walk across a bridge with a weight limit of 200 lbs. it matters, but if you want to know if you are gaining or losing weight does it matter? After all, if your scale says 198 lbs. next time you get on it, that number probably isn’t “real” either, but you do know that you gained 3 lbs. and that is what you care about.

Same thing with your FICO number and credit score. Unless you are actually applying for credit you don’t need the real number. I don’t know about you, but I get a new loan about once a year. The other 364 days all I need to know is if something I did made it go up or down. For example, last summer I closed a bunch of credit card accounts. I had these cards from back in my consultant days and did a lot of traveling so they were things like the American Express Hilton Points Rewards card. Now, Hilton is a great hotel and they are often perfectly located for business, but they aren’t really a tourist hotel. So, if I want to go to Savannah, Georgia and see the plantations and cherry blossoms and so on, I want to stay in the historic district. No Hilton there. If I want to stay over in the business are, there is a Hilton there. So, needless to say I wasn’t using this card or some of the others I had. (I use the American Express Hilton one now because I joined Costco and they only take American Express.)

When I went to get a new car (my old one came off of lease) I was stunned to find out that we had to pull all three credit scores in order to get one that was over 720. 720 was the cut off for the best rate (and in this situation the REAL number matters!). What caught me so off guard is that I have always had excellent credit. The only time I have EVER missed a payment was back in college when I moved back home for the summer and forgot to change my address with one company. Otherwise, perfect payment history. I ordered my credit reports and couldn’t find anything wrong. I didn’t have any missed payments, nothing! The difference was in my percentage of credit used. You see, I manage my cash flow very well, so I use credit cards to earn rewards like free trips and stuff. I cashed in a bunch of points for Baby’s R Us gift cards when my wife was pregnant and basically outfitted the nursery for free. As a result my credit cards always have a balance on them. I pay it off in full every month, but that still means there is a balance. That balance gets reported and since I closed all of my “empty” credit cards (Why not? I don’t use them) my percentage used went up. If I had known that was the effect, I obviously wouldn’t have done it.

How did I find out? I re-opened the Amex Hilton Card (for the Costco thing and to keep my existing Hilton Points from expiring) and then my wife’s car came off of lease (we bought that one) and my credit score was all of the sudden easily sailing over the 720 number. Now, I’m not willing to pay $10 a month or MORE! in order to watch my credit score, but it would be great if there was a way for me to check in on it every so often so I would know if something I did had a bad (or good) effect on it.

Yeah, Bellco! Good for you! Hopefully this thing updates every so often (quarterly would be fine) and I’ll keep checking it. Then, if I open say a Target Card (10% back after you spend $X) or a cash rebate gas card (1% back on gas sounds pretty good at $3 a gallon) I’ll know if it hurt my credit score and I’ll be able to do something about it before I’m applying for my next credit, whenever that might be.

If you live in Colorado, my advice is to open a Bellco account. Ask them what you have to open to get the online banking credit score. Then, track your score to see if what you do messes up your score. Sure, you probably have to leave $100 or something in an account you don’t use, but that beats paying $120 / year to see your score!

Want more information about Credit Cards

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Free Credit Score at My Credit Union originally published at Finance Gourmet

You can’t talk about [tag]credit cards[/tag] without talking about credit. And credit is all about your [tag]credit score[/tag] and your [tag]credit report[/tag]. Our articles on Your Credit Score and Your Credit Report have been posted over on Finance Gourmet. Check them out.

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Credit Reports and Credit Scores originally published at Finance Gourmet