How Closing Credit Accounts Can Undermine Credit Scores

In the last few months I’ve helped several families refinance and consolidate their credit card debt using the equity in their houses. One family was able to save $1,100 per month, another family $1,300 per month, and another family $1,700 per month. That represents a significant amount of any family’s monthly cash Read More >

5 Strategies to Lower Your Credit Card Utilization Rate and Improve Your Credit Score

Technology has inspired a great many beneficial inventions and creations. Whether credit scoring is one of them is a debate for another day, but credit scoring is here and it isn’t going away any time soon. That being said, one of the little known 5 key criteria that leads many people to have lower credit scores than Read More >

How Credit Card Utilization Rate Drives Your Credit Score

There was a time when paying your monthly debt payments by their respective due dates (on time) was enough to constitute good credit because your payment history was a great indicator of your willingness to repay your debts and to pay them on time. Your payment history used to account for nearly 100% of your overall Read More >

“Why” You Want to Get Out of Debt May Influence “How”

For the most part, Americans live in a fast food, shake and bake, society, which is to say that we have come to expect and demand instant gratification for anything we want in life. That’s typically how people accumulate credit card debt; instant gratification coupled with not having an emergency reserve. Instant Read More >

A Simple Formula For Getting Out of Debt

Credit card debt represents the single biggest threat to the financial health of countless millions of Americans. According to the Federal Reserve, after peaking at $1.021 Trillion in April 2008, the global financial crisis motivated Americans to trim their credit card debt to $832.4 Billion by April 2011. Since then, Read More >

Is Interest Rate the Most Important Factor When Paying Off Debt?

I deal with this issue frequently as I help my clients get out of debt and the short answer is NO! That is not to say that interest rate is not an important consideration. It just means that there may be other considerations that may have a greater impact on the speed and efficiency with which you get out of Read More >