I’ve Been Reviewing the Situation

…on our credit reports.

In case we do decide to enter into the wacky world of home ownership, which seems unlikely, given the difficulty we have had the past couple of days just trying to change gym memberships and figure out the best deal.

In case you didn’t know, you should all check your credit reports once a year, because it is free. Remember that the website to go to is www.annualcreditreport.com, not that other site that has advertisements on the radio (I wish Air America the best in getting out of bankruptcy, but I’m getting tired of the combination of annoying PSAs and ads for exploitative companies). The idea is to fix things now, and not when you are in the middle of trying to get a loan.

You can get one free report per year from each of the three big credit reporting companies. Some people recommend staggering the requests throughout the year, so you can keep tabs on any new problems. I did it all at once this time so we could clear up all the errors before setting any mortgage companies loose into our finances.

Fortunately, there were no major problems with our reports, and so far, the minor stuff has been corrected within a couple days of filing the disputes.

For what it’s worth, here are my impressions of the credit reporting companies:

Equifax: by far the most complicated process for disputing anything on the report. You have to register with a whole new username and password with CSC credit in order to get to the dispute form. On the other hand, CSC actually has rules about passwords to get you to choose a good one, so it is probably more secure. (See Bruce Schneier’s recent post on choosing secure passwords.)

Experian: by far the longest list of past addresses, in my case, every address I’ve used (including university addresses) since at least 1991.

Neither Experian nor TransUnion will allow you to correct mistakes within an address, only to dispute whether it is your current address (TU) or whether you ever lived there (Exp). Equifax only had our current addresses, and somehow managed to spell it all correctly, so I don’t know what their correction policy is. Supposedly the credit report companies get the addresses from creditors, but based on some of the errors, it looks more like they were trying to read scrawled writing on return addresses or they have some very bad data entry people. They made similar mistakes with the names our our employers (imagine you worked for “Univ CA” and they had “Univ XA”).

TransUnion did not have my old student loan accounts (paid off) listed, but the other two did.

Equifax and Experian both had old, closed credit card accounts listed as open (for each of us).

Equifax has “too new to rate” listed as the current status of a couple of accounts that were closed or paid off years ago, even though the account details show that it is closed or paid.

This post is putting even me to sleep, so I’ll spare you any further comments.

Wages

At the gym, I saw a story on CNN about a minimum wage proposal on the ballot in Missouri. The  living wage advocates want to raise the minimum wage an amount approximately equal to the hourly wage I got as a student manager at my work-study job in college.

My alumni magazine had an article about the class of ’06’s jobs after graduation. About 2/3 of the class had found full-time employment by the time they graduated. Of those, the median income was … approximately equal to my current salary, 18 years after graduating. (I don’t know if graduate TAships were included, since students going to graduate or professional school were listed separately.)

When I was still a student, my boyfriend and I once discussed post-graduation salaries. I wasn’t particularly savvy, but I named an amount that I thought was reasonable. He thought I was crazy (he was a computer science major). The amount I named was approximately the salary I ended up earning in my first year as an Assistant Professor at my university, 11 years after graduating. I don’t even remember what my salary was in Old Colony, where I went to work after I graduated, except that it was on the low end of the pay scale for Old Colony University, but plenty enough for a single woman to live on comfortably (and travel and save a bit) there.

If I had wanted to make a lot more money, I could have made other decisions about what to do with my life, but I didn’t.   The three years I spent in Old Colony were some of the best years of my life, and I am still amazed sometimes at how much money I make now,  so I’m not really complaining. Just noticing the coincidences.