What is a good credit score?

Your credit score is an all-important number, more so today than ever before. Traditionally your credit rating, or credit score, affected your ability to borrow money. However, nowadays it can also have an impact on your ability to find a job, rent an apartment, or get a security clearance.

It almost seems as if your credit score is now more important than your social security number — something many people realize too late.

But what is a good credit score?
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National credit score averages are dropping

As more Americans struggle to pay their bills while banks at the same time take actions to limit credit card debt, national credit score averages are dropping.
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Lower credit limits result in lower credit scores

What you don’t know can hurt you, especially when you do not know what is going on in your wallet — or in your credit card accounts.

In response both to the financial crisis and to new consumer protection rules slated to come into effect in 2010, credit card issuers are making major changes to customer accounts.

Many of these changes can negatively impact your credit score.

Yet a recent survey shows that many consumers are unware of recent changes made to their accounts.
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Paul Krugman on the worldwide financial crisis

Noted author and columnist, economist Paul Krugman shares his views on the current financial crisis. [video]
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5 Good Reasons to Always Check Your Credit Card Statements

If you are in the habit of routinely filing your credit card statements without so much as glancing at the list of charges, you could be losing money without knowing it.
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Just when you can use some extra money, credit card companies are making deep cuts

After years of flooding Americans with credit card offers and sky-high credit lines, lenders are sharply curtailing both, just as an eroding economy squeezes consumers.

The pullback is affecting even creditworthy consumers and threatens an already beleaguered banking industry with another wave of heavy losses after an era in which it reaped near record gains from the business of easy credit that it helped create.
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U.S. banks tighten credit card lending too late

Closing millions of accounts, cutting credit lines and raising interest rates are just some of the moves credit card issuers are using to try to inoculate themselves from a tsunami of expected consumer defaults.
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Did God want you to get that mortgage?

Has the so-called Prosperity gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants — and hence, victims — of the current financial crisis?

That’s what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of Pentecostal Christianity believes.
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U.S. Federal Reserve Orders Emergency Rate Cut to 1.5 Percent

The U.S. Federal Reserve and a consortium of European central banks today announced a half a point cut in a key interest rate, a coordinated effort to stave off an economic slump even as they continue struggling to tackle a crisis in global financial markets.
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Sold to US taxpayers for $700B: banks’ bad assets

What started as a fairly simple three-page proposal giving the Treasury Secretary unchecked power to orchestrate a bailout of the country’s financial system ended up as a complex rescue package, with enhanced congressional oversight, some added protections for taxpayers and a slap on the wrist to highly paid, underperforming executives.
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