Monthly Archives: July 2016

Free FICO Scores

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A FICO score is a number that represents an person’s creditworthiness. FICO scores range from 300 to 850. The higher the score, the more creditworthy you are considered to be. The median FICO score in the U.S. is 725. FICO scores are used by the vast majority of banks and credit card issuers to determine how much credit they are willing to give you and at what interest rate. Although many companies will tell you your FICO score for a fee, you don’t have to pay for it. You can get your FICO score for free in a number of ways. The easiest way to find out your FICO score is to examine your credit card statement. A number of credit card issuers, including American Express, Bank of America, and Citibank, print their customer’s FICO scores on their monthly statements. You may have to look hard to find it, but it’s there someplace on your statement. Other banks, such as Wells Fargo, don’t put FICO scores on their monthly statements but will tell their customers their FICO scores for free upon request. Discover card will tell anyone, not just their own cardholders, what their FICO score is for free by using Discover’s Credit Score Card website. If you have a student loan from Sallie Mae, they too will tell you your FICO score for free. This isn’t something that you need to pay for.

 
Free Credit Reports. You also do not have to pay to see or print out your credit report. You can get that for free as well. Read my article: Free Credit Report.

Convenience Fees

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Beware of Convenience Fees. A lot of colleges allow students to pay their bills with credit cards. Some students get excited when they see credit card logos on their college’s web site payment page – but beware! Many colleges tack on ‘convenience fees’ when you pay them with credit cards. For example, on the U.C. Berkeley payment page, it says that they will accept Master Card and Visa for the payment of room, board, and tuition; but they charge a 2.75% ‘convenience fee’ on all credit card payments. That’s a lot! Think about how much that will cost you in dollars and cents over the time you will be in college. Their ‘convenience fee’ is in addition to the interest that your credit card issuer will charge you. If you can pay your tuition some other way, you should probably do so.
 
What Is a ‘Convenience Fee’? U.C. Berkeley isn’t the only university that tacks on ‘convenience fees’ when students pay them with credit cards. This is now a common practice at colleges all over the U.S. But just what is a ‘convenience fee’? It has always seemed to me that the term ‘convenience fee’ is a misnomer. After all, a convenience fee isn’t really a fee you pay for your convenience. Most people would find it more convenient to not pay an added fee. What businesses call a convenience fee is really a credit card usage fee, even though few businesses are willing to admit that that is what it is. The term ‘convenience fee’ implies that the fee benefits the person paying the fee, but a convenience fee is always for the benefit of the business (or university) that receives the money. I think it would be more accurate to call a convenience fee an ‘inconvenience fee’.  Hmmmm. I wonder what my tenants would say if I said to them: “Well – I know your lease says that your rent is $1,800 a month, but it would be more convenient – for me – if you made out your monthly rent checks for $2,000.”

Tenants Will Get One Second of Free Rent in 2016. Is That Fair to Landlords?

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The year 2016 will be one second longer than most years. The U.S. Naval Observatory will add one ‘leap second’ to its atomic clock on December 31, 2016. All time zone clocks in the U.S. base their time on the atomic clock at the Naval Observatory. The reason for this is that the speed at which the Earth rotates on its axis varies slightly depending on climatic and geological conditions, and the Earth is slowing down. Every year, it takes the Earth a fraction of a second longer to go around the Sun than it did the previous year. As a result, a ‘leap second’ has to be added to the calendar every 500 to 700 days. That, in turn, means that if you rent your home, you will be getting one second of free rent this December! Now it seems to me that we landlords would be justified in raising our rents for the month of December this year since our tenants are going to get to live in their apartments for one second longer than they did last December. I haven’t heard of any landlords planning to do that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some did. We landlords do not like to give away free rent, even its just one second every few years.

Building Cathedrals in Medieval France.

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People seemed to enjoy my article last month about the identical statues in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Here is another from my collection of badly written homework:

“They built huge cathedrals all over France during the Midevil Period. They couldn’t build them earlier because France was still in its Evil Period. They had to wait until France was Midevil before they could build these big churches. Now France is good, so now they can build all the churches they want.”

Later on, and from the same essay: “We took a tour of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. Our tour guide was a French priest. He spoke English very well considering how short he was. I was surprised that he didn’t have a French accent because he was only 5 feet tall.”

Hmmm. A know a Catholic priest who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union here in Berkeley. I’ll check with him about this. I wonder what he knows about France’s ‘Midevil Period’.

Was The Civil War Fought Over States’ Rights or Slavery?

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Every year, at least one of my students asks me this question; however, there is no way to answer it because the question is illogical. The problem is that the question presumes that states’ rights and slavery were two separate issues, which they were not. Until the Constitution was amended at the end of the Civil War, slavery was a states’ right, and for the leaders of the Confederate government, it was the states’ right worth fighting over. Until the ratification of 13th Amendment, states could decide for themselves whether to allow or prohibit slavery. States could also regulate slavery as they pleased, and slave codes varied a lot from state to state. For example, New York allowed slavery for over 200 years but abolished it in 1828. In Maryland, my home state, there were both free blacks and slaves. Strangely, it was legal in Maryland for free blacks to own black slaves, and some did. When I was a kid growing up in Baltimore, I knew people who lived in houses that had slave quarters on the premises. The slave quarters were usually small buildings behind the main house that the current homeowners were, more often than not, using for storage. In Alabama, on the other hand, there were no free blacks. All black people in Alabama were slaves. If a slave in Alabama was given his freedom by his owner, he had to leave the state within 30 days. If he didn’t leave within that time, he would be arrested and sold back into slavery at public auction. This was called remancipation. So it is pointless to debate whether the Civil War was fought over states’ rights or slavery. They were not separate issues. Nevertheless, I hear white Southern politicians arguing about this question on TV all the time. It seems that for most Southern politicians, there is no question as to what the Civil War was all about. They all seem to think that it was all about states’ rights and that slavery had nothing to do with it. Why do so many Southerners believe that? I think it is because white Southerners would like to believe that their ancestors fought and died for a good cause, something more noble than simply the perpetuation of slavery.