Can I get some credit please?

Over the years I’ve spent a lot of hours doing financial counseling.  Not getting it but giving it.  Mostly to young couples and single moms who are getting ready to make the leap into first time home ownership.  So when an older person asked for my help with a financial matter, I gladly said I’d be happy to.  She had tried to apply for a credit card online.  She got this message at the end which she didn’t understand and wrote it down to show to me.  She had a general idea of her credit score, thus felt it would be no problem getting this new card.  I took one look at the message and asked when the last time she’d reviewed her credit report.  Never was her quick reply.  Ruh-roh, who knows what kinds of discrepancies may be on the thing.  Based on the message saying the company needed more info to make a decision, I was almost afraid of what might be on there.  A few quick minutes on a few websites and we had our answer.  Most of her personal info was incorrect or old and outdated on her credit report.  Plus there were a few credit hits she didn’t recognize.  Fine, I gently try to explain to her how to fix this and why it’s important to review her credit report every year from now on.  This led to her going on a rant about why the people at the credit bureaus needed to get off their fat arses, stop eating bon-bons and do their job of making sure these darn reports are correct.  Okay, I was so tempted at this point to ask her if she wanted one of those people to follow her around all of the time just to know when she switched jobs, moved, paid off her car loan early.  Yup, did she really want a permanent big brother situation?  Talk about unreasonable.  So instead I, as politely as I could, tried to explain again how it was her responsibility to ensure her credit report was accurate by checking it occasionally.  Yikes, all that got me was a tongue lashing on why I was such a perfect person who had to lord it over people how wonderful I was.  She was convinced I was the only person in the world who ever checked their credit report or even knew you could do such a thing.  Now I know there are some of you out there laughing at me right now – you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  Laugh all you want.  But this was important enough to try.  So try I did.  And got nowhere.  This is why financial education is so important.  This is why financial literacy should be taught in schools, by banks, by employers, at senior centers.  This isn’t something you can learn by instinct and just figure out by trial and error.  Well I guess you can, however, you might never get a credit card, a car, a house.  Yes, it would be nice if we could live in a world where we could buy anything we wanted for a buck and never had any debt.  But, let’s face it – that’s not reality.  And apparently reality sucks when it comes to staring at a million errors on your credit report.  So, please, if you’ve haven’t checked that report in a while (or ever), just do it!