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her personal info was incorrect or old and outdated on her credit report.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!
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