Yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting with one of my old high school friends and having dinner together. It was really enjoyable. We’re both rather quiet people (or at least, we were back in high school), but when we have the chance to get together and let our hair down, we are great fun.
It’s amazing how much has changed for both of us in the eight years since we graduated from high school (it’s also amazing that it’s been eight years already, but that’s for another day). He’s been married for over a year now, is currently a teacher at our old school, and is planning to go to England next year. (I was debating whether to bring up whether he’s planning to have kids, and if so, when, but there was only so much time to discuss everything.)
Sometimes, all it takes is the chance to talk and remember with an old buddy to make you laugh endlessly. (If you’re a very, very good blog audience, I might just share the Berlin story one day; remembering it made us both crack up for at least a solid minute.) And so, quite happily, let’s look at some of the good articles out this week:
What Factors Matter for Your FICO Score? – I’m guessing that this information is unlikely to be new to anyone reading this, but if by chance this is the first you’re hearing of it, there are a total of five factors that determine your Fair Issac Corporation (or FICO) score (more commonly referred to as your credit score). Over on Green Panda Treehouse, you can get much more detail on exactly what factors are involved, and how to improve each one. With luck, you won’t need to do much improving, but just in case…
Erasing Negative Credit History – Now that you know just what your credit history is like, you might see some things you don’t like; so, how can you go about rectifying the situation? In a guest post over on Poorer Than You, Kelly Oakin covers some of the ways you can erase negative marks on your credit report. It’s pretty good advice for anyone with less than ideal credit.
The Three Most Influential Lessons From My Childhood – My friend My Life ROI shares some of the good lessons he learned from his father during his childhood, including the difference between want and need, that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and that the best time to start saving, if you haven’t already, is now. Good stuff, good stuff; it kind of reminds me of an old post of mine, in a way 
Also, a happy birthday to Her Life ROI!
How to Guess A Social Security Number and Get Famous on the Internet – If you’re an American citizen, you’re probably (a) aware that your Social Security number has become a personal identifier nearly everywhere you go, (b) identity theft and similar crimes worry many people in our modern age and (c) anything that can panic a crowd will automatically grabs lots of headlines. So, if a group of researchers showed that, at least for a select group of Americans, it was fairly easy to guess their Social Security numbers, you’d expect there to be a cavalcade of media coverage, right? And you’d be correct: as Frank Curmudgeon of Bad Money Advice notes, there’s been a recently released study that shows just that.
But don’t panic yet. As Frank points out, the news isn’t really THAT bad. First, the odds of guessing a number, even in the best case scenario, are less than one in one thousand; not as hard as I would like, but more than enough to slow down the average punk with a Blackberry. Second, even that number only works for small states and people born in recent years; if you were born in a populous state, the odds are much lower, and ditto if you were born before 1989. Third, and least comfortingly, there are plenty of easier ways for no-good-niks to get your person information without relying on a brute force guessing techniques, so this new study will likely have little real world impact. See, no reason to worry!
Honest People Still Do Exist – Finally, a nice reminder from Studenomics: even in the dog-eat-dog, cut-throat, vicious world in which we live, there are still good, honest people. One of them returned Studenomic’s wallet over the weekend, using his address to get directions and personally returning the wallet to his house, before leaving without any kind of reward. I like to believe there’s a very special place in Heaven for people like that.
And on that note, goodbye to you all, my friends! Feel free to invite me to a pizza joint anytime; I’m a hoot!
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