Posts tagged “credit”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • What Does Your Credit-Card Company Know About You? – "In 2002 J. P. Martin, a math-loving executive at Canadian Tire, decided to analyze almost every piece of information his company had collected from credit-card transactions the previous year. His data indicated, for instance, that people who bought cheap, generic automotive oil were much more likely to miss a credit-card payment than someone who got the expensive, name-brand stuff. People who bought carbon-monoxide monitors for their homes or those little felt pads that stop chair legs from scratching the floor almost never missed payments. Anyone who purchased a chrome-skull car accessory or a “Mega Thruster Exhaust System” was pretty likely to miss paying his bill eventually. Why were felt-pad buyers so "upstanding? Because they wanted to protect their belongings, be they hardwood floors or credit scores."

    The article goes on to describe how debt collectors build relationships with (rather than harass) debtors, who pay off more to the brands they have a relationship with.

  • We Are Now In The Age Of Nice – another Sunday NYT unsubstantiated trend-attempt – That amiable guys and uncomplicated sweethearts could be today’s pop heroes is one sign of an outbreak of niceness across the cultural landscape — an attitude bubbling up in commercials, movies and even, to a degree, the normally not-nice blogosphere.
  • Can supposedly-predictive quantitative market research techniques help Hollywood? – Still, is it smart to bring on pricey consultants when corporate overlords are demanding cost cuts? And what of the parade of failed attempts by consumer research firms to break into Hollywood? Few people in the industry can forget Tremor, the research firm that was owned by Procter & Gamble. It came to Hollywood in 2002, signed up with Creative Artists Agency and roped clients like DreamWorks — though its ideas often proved prohibitively expensive.

annual credit report

Getting a credit report for those in the US is probably a good thing to do. That site allows you to get a free report from each agency every 12 months. You can do all three at once, or one of each every 4 months. I finally did it after it having been available in California since December. Better late than never.

Interesting to see what’s there:
the name ” STEVE L PORTILTOGEL”

the address “1139 AMARILLO APARTM
MILLBRAE, CA 94030-” when I once lived at “1139 AMARILLO AVE APT3
PALO ALTO, CA 94303-3710″ (i.e., same address but different city)

and a reference to ” ENGINEERING-MANAGEMENT SERVICE: PO BOX 370252, MONTARA, CA, 94037″ (our current PO Box)

I called them up and in a few minutes they changed the first two items, although it can take 30 to 45 days to process it and they’ll send me an email.

Obviously, none of these are bad errors, but it seems easier to keep it clean and prevent something weird in the future.

Update: The next day they updated it. They cleaned up the variations on 1139 Amarillo in Palo Alto (there had been two, one that said Apartment 3 and one that said APART and stopped there) and took out the variations in Millbrae. They got rid of the strange verison of my last name, and they deleted the Engineering-Management Service, with this note

As a part of our fraud protection efforts, we evaluate address information. The notice, “this is a non-residential address,” indicates that perhaps at one time business mail was accepted at this address, or the address was used as a mail drop, or a delivery service. It only advises a potential creditor to assure that this is your home address. The notice is about the address, not you.

It seems that they dropped the area codes on a bunch of my old phone numbers, but that hardly matters.

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