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You’re Gonna Die, Part 2

The Grim Reaper
The Grim Reaper (Photo credit: Helico)

You know that, at some point, you’re going to shuffle off of this mortal coil.

You will die.

Hopefully, you’ll have lived your life is such a way that the even won’t be easy for your heirs, but you can do a bit to make the process less painful for them.   Do you want them gutting your house trying to find out if you have a will, or does the idea of a treasure hunt for a life insurance policy make you smile?

Assuming you don’t intend to sit in the afterlife giggling about how difficult you’ve made life for your offspring, the first thing you need to do is find a spot to put your important paperwork.    This should, ideally, be a fireproof safe, which you can get for under $50.  You’re looking for something big enough to hold the things that matter, while being able to withstand a bit of fire, in case the part of “Grim Reaper” is being played by an arsonist.

The next thing you need to do is put your important papers in the safe.  Seriously, this beats both filing your insurance papers in a telephone book stacked in the corner and wrapping an envelope full of cash in a 10 year old newspaper and storing it with your recycling.   It’s also superior to tucking an insurance policy in a coupon mailer and losing it the cracks of a chair.*

Important papers include:

  • Your will
  • Life insurance policies, including accidental death policies
  • Bank account information, but don’t forget to remove these if you close an account
  • Safe deposit box information
  • Car titles and lien releases, if applicable
  • The deed to your house
  • Investment accounts
  • Retirement accounts

Things that are not important papers for your heirs:

  • The last 30 years of your monthly gas bill
  • The last 30 years of your electric bill
  • Home Shopping Network receipts
  • Child support filings for your 33 year old daughter who has 3 kids of her own
  • Coupon mailers
  • Credit card offers
  • 10 year old angry letters to the police department about that guy in the silver car who ran a stop sign in the grocery store parking lot

The final thing you need to do to make this all work is tell someone about it.  Don’t hope somebody will find a book that has “In case of death, my will is here” scrawled inside the cover, buried in your kitchen.  Really.   And if that is your plan, don’t move the will later, without updating the book.

Your homework over the weekend is to gather up your important papers and put them in a box.  Then tell someone about the box.

 

 

 

*I wish I was making this up.

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Fixing Your Credit Report

Sometimes, negative things appear on your credit report.  Usually, they do a good job of maintaining

Credit card (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

accuracy, but mistakes do happen. The creditor or the reporting agency may screw up, or you may have your identity stolen.  If either of these situations are true, you’ll want to correct your credit report, making yourself eligible for lower rates on future credit and, occasionally, lowering the cost of things like auto insurance.

If you throw “credit repair” into Google, you get 18 million hits.   Most of those are either outright scams or hopelessly optimistic about what they can accomplish. As I said once before:

Credit Repair is almost always a scam. There are ways to get correct bad information removed from your credit report.  If the information is correct, those methods are illegal.   There are two legal methods to repair your credit.  First, stop generating bad credit.  Make your payments on time and eventually, the bad items will fall off.   Second, write letters disputing the actual incorrect items on your credit report.  There are no quick fixes, and anybody telling you different is flirting with a jail sentence, possibly yours.

There are ways to avoid the scammers.

  • Avoid advance-fee credit repair. If they are any good, you will pay for results, not intentions.  If they charge beforehand, they are already breaking the law.
  • If they insist they can erase the accurate, but negative information, run away.
  • If they tell you to dispute everything negative, even the accurate information, run away.
  • If they tell you to create a new credit identity, don’t just run, report them.  It’s a felony.

Legally, you cannot get valid information removed from your credit report.  Anyone who tells you differently is advocating a crime. However, according to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), you are entitled dispute incorrect records.

To verify the accuracy of your credit report, you need to see it.  You can get a free report if your credit is used to deny you for something.  This is known as an “adverse action” .  You have 60 days from the denial to request the report.  You can also get one free report from each of the major credit bureaus each year. I space out these requests so I see my credit report every 4 months.

If there is inaccurate information on your report, dispute it in writing.  Send a letter to the credit bureau that is reporting the error.  Explain the problem and politely demand an investigation.   They will contact the creditor, who usually has 30 days to respond.   In the meantime, send a dispute letter to the creditor, along with proof of the inaccuracy.  If the investigation does not go your way, the creditor will have to report the dispute status to the credit bureaus in the future.

If the negative items are accurate, there is only one way to get it off of your report legally:  Wait.    Most negative information can only be reported for 7 years, while a bankruptcy will be reported for 10.

Another way to build your credit in the face of negative credit is to start building good credit to overshadow the bad. Get a credit card.  Your first credit card from the bottom of the debt-barrel will probably be a gas card or a store-branded credit card.    That’s fine.  The main consideration is are low or nonexistent fees.   Don’t accept application fees, activation fees, fees for carrying a balance or fees for not carrying a balance.    Annual fees are becoming a fact of life, so look for low fees.   The interest rate does not matter.   You will be paying this card off immediately, meaning no less often that every two weeks.  Make sure every penny is paid during the grace period, and make sure your card comes with a grace period.   Some don’t.  Those are bad cards to get.

There are no quick fixes for bad credit, just good new habits and time.

 

Saturday Roundup – Side Hustles Rock

Image via Wikipedia

We’re busy cleaning for our party next weekend, followed by spending an evening lying in a coffin in my yard, scaring the crap out of kids and giving them candy.

The best posts of the week:

Right now, I am actively pursuing 4 separate side hustles, 3 of which are generating actual cash.  It’s about $500 a month at the moment, but each of them are growing.  My goal is to hit $1500 a month by spring and have full replacement income within 2 years.  Everybody should have some kind of side income, just as a safety net.

One of my side hustles involves training in a niche with 200 companies competing for about 10,000 one-day students each year.    I could try to compete on price, but that’s an arms race to bargain-basement pricing.  Instead, we compete on value, and as such, we’re on track to bring in several multiples of our share of students this year, with growth projected to go well beyond that next year.

Knowing how much more I enjoy my side projects over my straight job, I want to encourage my kids to develop their own lines of income that will allow them to live the lives they want to live, without being a leech on society.

If they can start to get some of their own income, they can learn the value of the things they own, instead of assuming that everything is free.  I will not spoil my kids.

Finally, a list of the carnivals I’ve participated in:

Actions Have Consequences has been included in the Festival of Frugality.

If I missed anyone, please let me know.   Thanks for including me!