dusted.net

This week has been quite the busy week for financial matters at the homefront. First the bad news, Bank of America abruptly cancelled one of my credit cards. And of course, that account not only had my highest limit but it was also my oldest credit account, since I was 18. Effectively my credit history has been shortened by 80% and my overall credit limit cut by 60%, at least once the account is actually removed from the report. Wow. Granted, I hadn’t used the card in years. I would’ve used the card more, but it was a college card account, and I’m simply not going to use a card nowadays that doesn’t give rewards (although that may be going the way of the dodo). Doubly this since I live overseas, and would also get hit by the foreign transaction fees. Capital One is my choice for overseas travel and living, no foreign transaction fees, never had problems with them, and the one time some asshat at Delifrance stole my card information CO shut them down and got me a new card quickly – no hassles aside from not having a card for a few days. So yay! Hopefully no hijinks start with them next. I’ve more or less committed myself to eventually going down to 2 cards that I use on a regular basis, as long as they hold out I think I’ll be ok.

Just to eyeball things a little harder, I checked my credit report to see what’s the story there. Apparently things have changed in the past 6 months or so since I last attempted to check. It used to be if you were accessing the site from a non-US domain, you would get rejected – hence my rejection and a slight bit of consternation over if everything was still legit there. Nowadays however, it looks like you can (edit – apparently not, using a Malaysian domain I get the boot, but using the Australian servers at work I can), and furthermore it’s even easier to get your report – none of this “please make a new account with TransUnion so we can taunt you with spam, and hopefully you remember this login a year down the road when it’s time to check it again.” So I was able to pull a report – aside from Victoria’s Secret doing a check on me, everything there looked in place (I guess they were checking if I was a suitable sugar daddy or not… giggity).

I also found out about a free service, Credit Karma, that while it doesn’t give you the details, it does provide a high level overview of your report. Even better, you get your Transunion score, which theoretically should be close to the FICO. Give them a whirl, the statistics they collect is interesting to look at. I’m not so sure how good their modeling ability is, but the other features on the website are nifty.

The good news is, I finally found a pretty kickass replacement for Quicken that I’ve been using since 2005. I finally got fed up with the slowness of the program and the overall complexity for something that I just want to keep track of my expenses. I demoed a few and finally went with iBank. It’s a pretty fast and intuitive piece of software. Simple to set up accounts, simple to bring in the past 4.5 years of Quicken, simple to make a variety of reports and charts, and a very OS X interface. I just updated my accounts today with the latest statements, and it was a satisfying breeze to do. Definitely a keeper! If you’re looking for a good alternative on OS X for some banking software, give iBank a try.

To sum up things – we’re still in the black, BoA sofa king sucks, iBank rocks, Credit Karma is fun, and lingerie supermodels are checking my credit rating.

N/P – The Cardigans – My Favourite Game