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Your Credit Score: How to Improve the 3-Digit Number That Shapes Your Financial Future, 5th edition

Published by FT Press (October 12, 2015) © 2016

  • Liz Weston

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Today, a good credit score is essential for getting decent terms on credit – or for getting credit at all. But that's just the beginning: You're now being judged on your credit score by everyone from employers to cellphone carriers. Now, best-selling journalist Liz Pulliam Weston has thoroughly updated her top-selling guide to credit scores, with crucial new information for protecting (or rebuilding) yours.

Weston thoroughly covers brand-new laws and rules surrounding credit scoring – including some surprising good news and some frightening new risks. Don’t settle for an out-of-date guide to credit scoring, when Your Credit Score, Fifth Edition offers brand-new coverage of all this, and more: 

  • Recent consumer-friendly reforms in lending, credit score calculation, and credit bureau behavior – and how to take advantage of them
  • How you can finally get your credit disputes reviewed by an actual human being
  • Why recent medical debts shouldn’t impact your score anymore
  • How to get a legitimately free FICO score without getting ripped off
  • How lenders have recently loosened their criteria, making it easier to get loans even if your credit isn’t perfect
  • Important new options for student loan borrowers – including brand-new ways to dramatically limit your payments
  • How tax refund fraud is soaring – and the one little-known way to avoid becoming a victim
  • The disappearance of “manual underwriting”: why it’s now virtually impossible to get a mortgage without credit scores

Weston updates her guidance on raising your FICO score... fighting lower limits or higher rates... maintaining the right mix of cards and balances... bouncing back from bad credit... choosing credit "solutions" that help, not hurt... explodes both new and old myths about credit scoring… and much more!

The most popular, best-selling book on credit scores – now fully updated to reflect the latest changes, new protections, and new risks to your credit!

  • National Bestseller!
  • What you MUST know about brand-new reforms and protections... changing credit standards… legitimate ways to get free FICO scores… new dispute resolution procedures… improvements in medical debt scoring… student loan changes… and much more.
  • How to protect your credit score from new dangers, including tax refund fraud and mass credit card hacking

1. Why Your Credit Score Matters

2. How Credit Scoring Works

3. FICO vs. FAKO--Competitors to the Leading Score

4. Improving Your Score--The Right Way

5. Credit Scoring Myths

6. Coping with a Credit Crisis

7. Rebuilding Your Score After a Credit Disaster

8. Identity Theft and Your Credit

9. Emergency! Fixing Your Credit Score Fast

10. Insurance and Your Credit Score

11. Employment and Your Credit

12. Keeping Your Score Healthy

 

The #1 best-selling guide to improving your credit score, now fully updated to cover important new consumer-friendly reforms, dangerous new risks, and what you can do NOW to build your score!

Liz Weston is an award-winning, nationally-syndicated personal finance columnist and the author of several books, including the best-selling Your Credit Score.

She’s a contributing editor for Bankrate.com and writes about education and money for Reuters news service. Her question-and-answer column “Money Talk” appears in newspapers throughout the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Palm Beach Post and the Portland Oregonian, among others.

Liz has appeared on “The Dr. Phil Show,” “NBC Nightly News,” “The Today Show” and CNBC, among other programs. She is a regular commentator on public radio, including Marketplace Money’s “Getting Personal” segments.

She was awarded the 2010 Betty Furness Consumer Media Award by the Consumer Federation of America, designed to honor individuals who have made “exceptional progress in American consumerism.” Other honors include a 2007 Clarion Award for her MSN series on financial benchmarks and a 2008 “Best in Business” designation from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. She participated in journalism teams that won a Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service in 1989 and a Gerald Loeb business journalism award in 1997. She has a bachelor’s degree in economics and communications from Pacific Lutheran University and is a graduate of the Certified Financial Planner training program.

Her other books include Deal with Your Debt: Free Yourself from What You Owe, recently released in a second edition; The 10 Commandments of Money: Survive and Thrive in the New Economy; There are No Dumb Questions About Money, and Easy Money: How to Simplify Your Finances and Get What You Want Out of Life.

She lives with her husband and daughter in Los Angeles and blogs at AskLizWeston.com.

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