Tax Tips and Advice with Carrie Smith of Carefulcents.com
Directbanc.com Goes In Depth with the Personal Finance Experts and their Personal Finance Blogs.
Today marks the debut of our “Asking the Experts” series of interviews with the best Personal Finance Experts from around the web. Our goal is to provide helpful information on a wide range of financial topics that affect a wide range of consumers.
We begin our financial expert series with the wonderful personal finance blogger Carrie Smith. Carrie Smith is the writer behind the Careful Cents personal finance blog. She’s a Certified Bookkeeper and Tax Consultant who loves to travel. She’s also a career junkie, social media addict, debt hater and food lover.
The Interview
1. When considering the option of becoming self-employed, what are three tax implications that must be taken into consideration? • Self-Employment tax. One of the first
High Credit Scores Don’t Always Have Benefits
33 year old financial planner, Jeff Rose has been trying to enhance his credit rating even though it currently stands at 780 which are 69 points above average.
Rose lives in Illinois and has recently acquired a second credit card in the past year as a way of boosting his credit score.
Rose has said that he is unsure of what actions actually boosted or hurt his credit score and he would like to get his score above 800 to make sure that he gets the best deal when he comes to refinancing his mortgage.
A large number of people have been attempting to get their credit scores above the 800 mark just three years after the credit crisis first hit forcing banks and lenders to close down accounts and cut credit limits.
Although these attempts may very well be in vain as once a person has a credit score of 760 then obtaining a higher score will not necessarily mean that they will automatically get a better rate of interest on credit and mortgages, according to Greg McBride the senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com.
Theres very little incremental benefit to getting a score above that,
said McBride.
Do Credit Scores Work?
Rest assured that lenders are asking the same questions about credit scores. After all, they want some assurance that the tools they’re using are actually doing what they’re designed to do. In fact, they track performance pretty closely because their business depends on it. You’ve heard that a FICO score of 700 in past is more like a 680 today. Well, how do they know that?
I’ll spare you all the statistical speak and try and boil it down for you. Essentially you want two things, a large snapshot data set of consumers with scores at a particular point in time. They call this an observation data set. Then, you want a second data set containing indications of how those consumers paid over a period following the original score data – usually 12 months. This is called performance data and consumers are usually classified as “good” or “bad” based on how they paid.
Don’t get hung up on the labels. They could just as easily call them “A” and “B”. (They don’t really know or need t
Zappos Announces Security Breach
Over the weekend, hackers gained access to customer data stored on Zappos’ servers. The company, which is owned by online giant Amazon.com, sent out e-mails to customers on Sunday, advising them to reset their passwords. Zappos also expired all customers’ passwords as a security measure. The popular shoe and clothing company advised that the databases retaining critical credit card information and payment data remained untouched and secure.
Sunday’s e-mail message advised, “We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number , and/or your cryptographically scrambled password .”
Zappos now requires that customers’ passwords be more complex, containing numbers, letters, at least one uppercase letter, and one character.
Retaliation Promised by Israel After Credit Card Breach
ISRAEL The information from thousands of credit cards was leaked by a hacker named OxOmar. The Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon has said that these cyber attacks are a breach of sovereignty comparable to a terrorist operation, and must be treated as such. According to the credit card companies, at least 6,000 cards had been exposed.
The hacker responsible for the attacks claims he is Saudi, but reports state he is believed to be a nineteen year old living in Mexico.