Archive for September 23rd, 2011

Delicious day

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Today I didn’t work overtime, which was what I was expecting to do all week until suddenly I wasn’t going to have to work overtime!  It really came as a surprise.  So today, instead of working overtime, I slept in.  Which was especially good because I was up in the middle of the night with an upset stomach that felt like I had swallowed tacks, either as a side-effect from my flu shot on Thursday or because I gave in to my craving for Cheetos.  (Delicious radioactive orange chemical and carbohydrate crunchies!)

But sleeping in felt wonderful and my stomach felt fine when I woke up.  I went downstairs and I did yoga for about half an hour, which is half an hour longer than I’ve done yoga in the last couple months.  My goal for the next couple weeks:  get back on track with the Couch to 5K program (we got out of that when I hurt my knee), walk three of the other days of the week when we’re not running, and get back to doing my yoga.  My flexibility is completely shot.

We showered, dressed, breakfasted, relaxed a couple minutes, and then tidied up the house a little bit.  I sat down to write the post here about credit reports (you really should check yours) and watched some TV with Justin.  And then we went downstairs and cleaned the kitchen, which we’d put off earlier in our tidying, and I started a loaf of bread in the breadmaker and worked on making a pie.  We had apples and pears that were past their prime, so I baked them into a pie following this recipe.  Delicious!  And I love baking.  I love the patience of it and the intricacies of it and just the movements that go into pealing and slicing apples and mixing that with sugar, flour, and spices, and filling in a pie crust.  It’s like singing, except I get to eat it in the end.  And that analogy probably doesn’t work unless you understand how I feel when I’m singing.

Moving on.  I got that started and asked Justin to make sure it got out of the oven okay, described what it should look like in the end, and then I went for my walk.  See?  Goal:  yoga and walking.  Accomplished!  I took an umbrella with me because it looked like rain and about 10 minutes away from getting back to the house, it did start to rain.  I ran into three women who were sheltering beneath a tree, waiting to see if it would stop.  I told them I didn’t think it was going to end very soon, and they started back to their homes.  We ran into Justin about a minute later, coming to look for me with the biggest umbrella we own.  Because he’s wonderful like that and he wasn’t sure if I’d taken an umbrella with me.

We got home and I changed into dry clothes so we could go to our chiropractor appointment, saw an enormous rainbow on our way, and then we came home and started meatloaf for dinner and caught up more on television shows that started last week.  He’s been catching up on How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family and I’ve been watching NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles.

And then, finally, we got a piece of that pie!  It was amazing!

And really, I’m just writing all this because it was a wonderfully relaxed, delicious kind of day and I wanted to write it down.

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Credit reports

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Last night I did actually manage to get online and get a copy of my (and Justin’s) credit reports.  And I know it’s completely boring, but I think it’s important to do that at least every couple years, so let me tell you a little bit about how it works and why it’s important.

DISCLAIMER: I’m not a financial expert or anything.  The information I’m giving here is just from my personal experience and things I’ve read.  If you’re looking for actually better informed research on credit reports and credit scores, I recommend going somewhere else.  Like here or here.

I got to AnnualCreditReport.com.  And I can’t remember why that’s the one I go to, if that’s the only free site or what, but there it is.  It’ll ask you what state you live in, ask you to fill in your name, social security number, birthday, address(s), and fill in a word captcha-type thing and then ask you which report you’d like to see.  There are three:  Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.  I get all three because sometimes things are written on one that aren’t listed on another and I want to get as full a picture as I possibly can.  The annoying bit is that you can only get one at a time and then it’ll boot you back to the very beginning and you have to put in all that information all over again.  So you end up typing it in again and again.

Anyway, you type in all your information, choose the report you want to see, and it might ask you a couple more questions, like “are you familiar with any of these phone numbers” and “which of these businesses was your employer” and stuff like that.  And then it’ll show your report.

And then I print it or save it to .pdf so I can have it as a reference.  You can only access it once a year for free, so if you’re going to be interested in seeing it again that year, save a copy.  And I had trouble saving it, so make sure you check it before you leave the site.  For some reason, I kept only getting the first couple pages.

I printed off all three of my reports and all three of Justin’s reports.  Joint accounts show up on both, but accounts that are only one or the other, like school loans, only show up on the report of the person who took out the loan, obviously.

Okay, on to what’s listed on the reports.  The reports are all formatted differently and might show information differently, but what you’re really looking to see is what accounts are showing up and the standing of those accounts.  So, I have several credit cards, an auto loan, and a handful of school loans.  I check to see that the accounts that I expect to be closed are closed with a $0 balance, I check that the accounts I expect to be open are correct and there isn’t anything showing that I don’t expect, and that the balance on those accounts is what I expect.  And then I check the status of the open accounts to see if there are any late payments showing up.  The report holds information for 7 years, I think it is, so any problems that happened with repayment will stick around for several years, and that’s the type of information that lenders are interested in seeing.  So, for example, problems that Justin had with getting payments in on time back in 2007 are still showing up on the accounts.  But they’ll fall off in a couple years and then his credit score will go up.

I’m not going to get into the ins and outs of the credit score because there are whole books about that and it’s more complicated than I care to discuss.  Go to the experts for that.

I tend to think it’s a little interesting to see all this information — I can see how many of my loans are paid off, see how far back my credit history goes (1995, interestingly enough, because Dad added me to a credit card when I went to college and apparently that’s the date when he opened that credit line), and who all has been asking to see my credit report since that information is also listed on the report.  I like to know that my repayment history is looking clean.  And I discovered that my bank extended my line of credit last month by $500.  I didn’t know that!

If you’ve been a victim of identity theft, this would show you that, too, since you’d see accounts that you didn’t open.

All in all, I think of it like an annual check-up on my finances just like I go in for an annual check-up with my doctor.  Go over everything carefully and make sure it’s all healthy.  Nobody really enjoys all the things that go into an annual physical exam, and the same goes for reviewing financial accounts so carefully, but it’s better to catch problems as early on as possible.  And that’s why I think this is so important, even though it’s dull.

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