The Nerdist Way_ How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) - Chris Hardwick [77]
CHARACTERCIZE
Get your credit report.
Write down the companies who are negatively reporting you.
Write down their correspondence info.
Communicate with them regularly.
Scratch them out as they get repaired.
GIVE YOURSELF SOME CREDIT (HAR HAR)
Some people will tell you to get rid of all your credit cards. This is not smart. Part of having a credit score is proving that you can use credit properly. Those who loan money want to know that you will actually carry at least a small balance (even if it’s $30), because they make money charging you interest. I’ve been told (though exact algorithms for scoring are guarded secrets—pretty rad for the consumer, huh?) that small balances paid on time every month will improve your score. You don’t want to carry a balance equal to or in excess of 50 percent of your allotted credit or you will be perceived as a risk. I held on to two credit cards with revolving credit (the pay-a-minimum-amount-every-month kind). I devoted a small percentage of my income to paying above the minimum payment each month to start getting those down.
Finally, I managed to get an American Express card. They’re not paying me or anything. (But they SHOULD. At least one o’ them shiny black cards that all the fancy people use! #1stWorld-Problems) My plan was that you CAN’T revolve credit on a green AmEx. You have to pay it off, in full, at the end of every billing cycle. This is ENORMOUSLY motivating to curb spending. With revolving credit, buying things just feels like you’re throwing the payment into the stratosphere, and someday it’ll fall back down, somewhere. It’s ONLY a small amount, after all! By the time you get the bills, the momentum of several of these purchases will cut you into pieces, not unlike when pennies get tossed off a tall building and land on your skull. The other benefit to AmEx is that they have a decent reward system, though the “redeeming for travel” part of it doesn’t always work out the way you’d want. (Airlines have VERY specific rules for the redemption of these points. It’s doable, just pay attention to those rules.) In any case, your Nerdism will appreciate the point accrual aspect of it all.
BEFRIENDING TIME
After you’ve done all that you can do, you need to strap in and ride Time until your credit report is as clean as a Canadian pay toilet. (Those are actually very clean. I was very impressed in Toronto once. Hats off to you, Canada! Hey, stop leering at me like that, Montreal—or “Practice France” as I like to call you.) Waiting it out and living responsibly WILL start to pay off, and it is VERY satisfying. Of all the things in life that can’t grant us 100 percent assurance, to know that your credit report HAS to right itself by law was incredibly comforting to me. When everything did finally fall off that finite conveyor belt, I may have gotten a little misty. Take care of your credit. Consumerism aside, it is a valuable lesson in patience, persistence, and responsibility.
ON RESPONSIBLE USAGE OF TIME
An Open Letter from Doc Brown to Marty McFly
Dear Marty—
Having recently reviewed the surveillance footage of the events of the night you went back to 1985, I couldn’t help but be slightly taken aback by your spurious reasoning of only allowing TEN FUCKING MINUTES to SAVE MY GODDAMN LIFE. Ten minutes??? Really. You actually thought that you could get from the Courthouse to Twin Pines Mall (I’m sorry, I mean LONE Pine Mall now—way to run over a tree, fucknut) in ten minutes. What the fuck did you think that could accomplish? What were you going to do? Vanquish the Libyans with your shortness? Yeah, I said it. YOU’RE TINY. Like the rat in Ratatouille (2008 reference), but in a puffy vest. Listen, you little feathered-haired leprechaun, any one of these Hill Valley MOUTH-BREATHERS would have had the good sense to go back, oh, I don’t know, AT LEAST A DAY to give me time to prepare for the Middle East extremists and