PSA: no matter what, Equifax may tell you you've been impacted by the hack
I am now believing these guys are not producers, but looters in disguise. They manufactured a system over time that has business addicted to their "credit scores" that profess to be accurate representations of your "trustworthiness" (if so why does someone who pays all their bills on time, never having a bad mark, rate a score of "675", and thus get 18% interest offered to them, because of that score? One would think paying your bills is the one thing a lender needs to know...) Thats same system professed a need for every bit of data you ever had to identify yourself, then they allow their most valuable material to be stolen en masse, and their top 3 executives dump al their stock days before the announcement? Toa dd insult to injury, if you check your "status" it appears dead people, Dumbocrap voters, Russian citizens, and Mickey Mouse, all had their data stolen, so sign up for our free credit monitoring (by a company they, the people who caused the issue, own). The weadd the fact you just unknowingly signed away your right to sue, by agreeing through their use clause, to arbitration only. These guys have got looting tuned to a fine science and make a great companion to the Federal Government....
But all of it comes with a price of experimenting, configuring, and troubleshooting when something you want doesn't work right because some limit is too strict.
There are a lot of good reasons to seek more privacy on the internet, and a lot of reasons, including good ones, that the FBI doesn't like. The IRS in particular doesn't like private currencies.
The government is carrying on a surveillance war against tor to break it. It's ironic that after the initial computer science networking research it became a project supporting dissidents, international human rights supporters, journalists, etc., funded by the Office of Naval Research and DARPA.
It's hard to escape google scanning your email even without a gmail account because so many others you communicate with use it.
For accessing social media in read-only mode you can set up accounts with no information added, but you will be surprised to see what shows up in ad displays, revealing how they are tracking your connection and merging information. It helps to use a vpn connection and//or the tor browser for some of what you access.
Installment stuff doesn't affect it much, other than short term hits when a new loan is opened until a good history is established.
The same thing happened to me, except we were living together and had a wedding date next year when I discovered she was running up high-interest debt and lying about it. It was for every assortment of fancy candles, nail polish, etc. I dodged a bullet.
They collect a fee form merchants in the 3% range and then return half of it to consumers in bonus rewards of some form. The merchant gets to avoid the problems of keeping so much cash on hand. They also get the chance that the consumer will swipe the card and not think as hard as he would turning over hard-earned bills. The bank gets the chance that a consumer who would not walk into a bank and ask for a loan might accidentally find himself in credit card debt.
On our last vacation we took out a wad of cash that we wanted to spend. It made it so easy to watch the bills go down as we came to the end of the vacation. It actually felt like we got more value for our money just by being aware. One merchant gave us a discount. If we had used cards, we would have had to check online or add them up. That would have worked. But cash is so easy. It keeps track of itself. If I had never heard of card payments, it's not a product I would ever have sought out.
The industry calls you a "deadbeat". They want you to buy their product, debt. People not purchasing their product is of no interest to them except that they're potential new purchasers.
BTW, I don't hold it against them at all for wanting to sell their product. I don't even care if they make a little game where they size up how favored a customer you are. They're providing a valuable service for willing customers. They're free to make a figure-of-merit game out of promoting their product if they want.
They try to convince people, though, that they have a benchmark for responsible behavior. A much, much better benchmark for good financial management is building wealth for yourself. Actual wealth is infinitely more important than the banking industry's opinion of you as a potential customer.
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