Confessions of a Credit Junkie

Confessions of a Credit Junkie:  Everything You Need To Know to Avoid The Mistakes I Made  by Beverly Harzog                 Paperback Book:  224 pages           

Most excellent book on the facts behind credit scores and an everything you need to know book about maintaining your financial sanity.    She is so candid about her own mistakes living outside her means vicariously through her credit until the bills caught up with her and were so momentous she realized she had to reign her spending in and take control of her finances.   The author also has a website that she offers help and counselling on.   She breaks down all the big bad credit returns and walks readers through deciphering their credit reports.    She tells you how and where to get free credit reports with actual FICO scores not the FACO scores as she calls them that might give you an idea of your actual credit scores as tallied by the big 3:  Experian, TransUnion and Equifax and if the score you are getting is not from one of the big 3 it is a FAKO score which is not entirely accurate though in the ballpark enough that it will give you an idea of where you are and where you need to be.    The big thing I took away from Harzog’s book is that I learned about the credit ratio which is incredibly important in the tabulation of your credit score but is often not mentioned.    She says the big 3 credit bureaus recommend people never accumulate more debt than 30% of their credit limits with creditors, but, Harzog says folks should never accumulate more than 10% of their credit limits because this counts BIG when future bankers, credit card companies, and even employers pull your pinger (check your credit viability to see what you are up to).   She is a great teacher of all things credit and her books are worthy to be read cover to cover and more than once.    She reads all the fine print so you don’t have to, then she regurgitates all that in terms we can all understand without wading through legal jargon.  I loved this book I highly recommend it and all of her other books.   She cuts out all the blah blah blah stuff and gets to the heart of what you really need to know.   10 stars for this one!