Don’t Make This Surprisingly Common Credit Mistake
Checking your credit report regularly is a basic rule of personal finance. More than one in three Americans has failed to follow that rule — they’ve never looked at their report, according to a new study from Bankrate.com.
The report finds that 35 percent of all Americans have never reviewed their credit reports, and 14 percent check less than once a year. Senior citizens are the biggest slackers, with 44 percent saying they’ve never checked their report, followed by 41 percent of millennials.
Related: 5 Easy Ways to Ruin a Perfect Credit Score
Your credit report is the foundation of your credit score, a key number that landlords, employers and lenders use to measure financial responsibility. Having a good credit score is critical for financial success because it gets you access to lenders’ best rates and terms, which can save you thousands of dollars each year.
By law you are entitled to access your credit reports from each of the three major credit-reporting companies — Experian, TransUnion and Equifax — for free once every 12 months. You can do that at AnnualCreditReport.com.
The Bankrate survey found that about half of Americans have reviewed at least one of their credit reports within the past year, and a quarter of Americans review them more than once a year.
“Monitoring your credit goes well beyond scanning a three-digit number,” Bankrate credit card analyst Jeanine Skowronski said in a statement. “Americans need to thoroughly review their credit reports for errors or signs of fraud. They also need to understand what factors, like missed payments or high debt-to-credit ratios, are driving their credit score in order to improve it.”
If you don’t know what’s on your credit reports, now is a good time to find out.
Budget ‘Chaos’ Threatens Army Reset: Retired General
One thing is standing in the way of a major ongoing effort to reset the U.S. Army, writes Carter Ham, a retired four-star general who’s now president and CEO of the Association of the U.S. Army, at Defense One. “The problem is the Washington, D.C., budget quagmire.”
The issue is more than just a matter of funding levels. “What hurts more is the erratic, unreliable and downright harmful federal budget process,” which has forced the Army to plan based on stopgap “continuing resolutions” instead of approved budgets for nine straight fiscal years. “A slowdown in combat-related training, production delays in new weapons, and a postponement of increases in Army troop levels are among the immediate impacts of operating under this ill-named continuing resolution. It’s not continuous and it certainly doesn’t display resolve.”
Pentagon Pushes for Faster F-35 Cost Cuts
The Pentagon has taken over cost-cutting efforts for the F-35 program, which has been plagued by years of cost overruns, production delays and technical problems. The Defense Department rejected a cost-saving plan proposed by contractors including principal manufacturer Lockheed Martin as being too slow to produce substantial savings. Instead, it gave Lockheed a $60 million contract “to pursue further efficiency measures, with more oversight of how the money was spent,” The Wall Street Journal’s Doug Cameron reports. F-35 program leaders “say they want more of the cost-saving effort directed at smaller suppliers that haven’t been pressured enough.” The Pentagon plans to cut the price of the F-35A model used by the Air Force from a recent $94.6 million each to around $80 million by 2020. Overall, the price of developing the F-35 has climbed above $400 billion, with the total program cost now projected at $1.53 trillion. (Wall Street Journal, CNBC)
Chart of the Day - October 6, 2017
Financial performance for insurers in the individual Obamacare markets is improving, driven by higher premiums and slower growth in claims. This suggests that the market is stabilizing. (Kaiser Family Foundation)
Quote of the Day - October 5, 2017
"The train's left the station, and if you're a budget hawk, you were left at the station." -- Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C.