All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

Very true and with a Chapter 11 filing ALL contracts are voided and renegotiated by the trustee and require approval of the bankruptcy judge.

Originally posted by Jeremy Sharff:

On the flip side, the auto industry does support a lot of other businesses (not to mention a state) and right now, is that collapse something our economy can handle?

First, not all three would collapse. Second, a chapter 11 bankruptcy is EXACTLY what is needed. There is absolutely no viability in any of the Big 3 with the current union contracts in place. Chapter 11 will fix that problem.

Originally posted by Caitlyn Coyle:

I sure agree with this. I've seen it many, many times, which is why I hate FICO scoring.

You keep mixing your metaphors. FICO is not responsible for nor the cause of the data being messed up.

Originally posted by Brian Diez:

I prefer to believe that Taz was referring to the purchasing of Authorized User accounts to establish credit history where there was none, but he can elaborate.

That is one way the system is gamed. Flooding the CRAs with bogus claims in the hopes they can't/don't/won't verify within the time allowed by law is also gaming the system.


Just because people and politicians want the CRAs to be arbitrators of what is factually correct, it just won't ever happen. The CRAs are aggregators of data. They are 100% dependent upon those reporting the data to report accurate data.


This is where I find "credit repair" types so disgusting. You are the reason no investigations take place because you are flooding the CRAs AND their customers with bogus claims that are not worth the time and effort needed to investigate.

In a very real sense, as a "credit repair" consultant, service, whatever you want to call yourself, you are much more a part of the problem than the solution.

First, embed the video in that first page. Don't make your visitor click to another page and then have to click to start the video. Make it really simple for the visitor to know WHAT you want them to do next.

As an aside, I suggest you get a book titled, "Don't Make Me Think"

As a method of promoting the property video is a great idea. But, if you are going to go to the trouble to create and present the video make it look great.

Consider staging the house with furniture, but at a bare minimum put a stove and refrigerator in the kitchen. Don't depend on the viewer having any imagination. While I presume the stove and frig go against the outside wall to the left of the sink area, the viewer may not pick up on that. So, put them there even if you add a disclaimer saying they don't go with the house. They don't even have to be functional if you are not going to include them in the purchase, but they should look good.

When you film the videos, either have the power turned on or get a QUIET generator on-site to provide power to the lights. Honda makes some really inexpensively priced quiet units that will easily provide the lighting you need to film a video.

The other thing is, since this is targeted to investors, you might want to consider a "before" video too. That way you can highlight the value your company added during the rehab.

Originally posted by Caitlyn Coyle:

For sure you haven't worked in the trenches analyzing credit reports and listening to the stories behind them.

For sure, you have a habit of assuming facts not in evidence.


Nope, right here on earth. See comment above.


Nope, but unlike you, apparently, I know fraud is not always a crime against a government agency.


Now you are just being silly.

I recently tried to help a consumer clear derogs from her credit report that were the result of identity theft. The person who stole her identity was convicted and was paying monthly restitution (repayment of credit cards he used illegally), yet after a year of laborious effort, she could not get two of her creditors to recognize the court paperwork she presented as proof that her identity was stolen and that was the reason for some lates. Because her FICO score was < 680, she had to get an FHA loan, with its attendant mandatory mortgage insurance, rather than a conforming loan, even though she would ideally have put 20% down to avoid mortgage insurance.

Another woman, intending to be out of town when her mortgage payment was due, used an online system (for the first time) to make her mortgage payment while she was gone. Apparently, she did something procedurally wrong and didn't "confirm" the instructions. When she returned, she learned that the payment wasn't made and she received a "recent 30 day late," the kiss o' death to a refinance lender. It took two months to get her behemoth lender to determine, by going into the bowels of its online system, that she had, in fact, visited the site and attempted to put a pre-payment instruction in place. It took another two months for the CRAs to apply the delete letter to her account, thereby positively impacting her score--by which time rates had climbed.

It was only recently, after I spent a decade battling the negative implications of invalid medical collections, that Fair Isaac recognized the intractable nature of medical collections, and adjusted its filters accordingly.

None of those examples have anything to do with gaming the system. Remember, I said invalid items should be challenged.


You seem incapable of separating the model from the data. Don't feel bad, it is a common situation. The data in the credit files is all screwed up. Therefore, anything depending solely on that data is going to have problems.


Really?


That is absolutely not true. Having multiple accounts in collection is worse than having one. Two is worse than one, three is worse than two. Obviously, there comes a time when the incremental impact of "just one more" approaches zero but the example you are giving while emotionally appealing, is quite bogus.

Consumer: "I'm not paying $966 for something I don't owe!"

Loan officer: "Well, you've got to decide what hill you want to die on. Do you want to stand on principle and not get a loan, or do you want to pay the $966 and buy a home? Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?"

Don't you find that a bit twisted?

Yes, because the loan officer is full of $h|t when they say that. That is exactly what I was referring to earlier. That is why we manually underwrite and why I use a lender, a big one, btw, for my personal mortgages who manually underwrite my loans.

Bottom line?

Do not take on more debt than you can handle.
Pay your bills on time, every time, like you agreed to do when you signed the contracts.
Watch your credit file for invalid and incorrect information and challenge it when it appears.
Stop whining about the valid stuff showing you have not lived up to your credit obligations in the past.

Pretty simple, really.

Originally posted by Caitlyn Coyle:

Do you have a credible citation for this belief? How would an actuarial approach be better?

Bill Fair, an engineer and Earl Isaac, a mathematician founded a consulting firm in 1956 named mundanely enough, the Fair Isaac Corp. They provided consulting services to businesses in risk assessment and risk management. They are still primarily a management consulting company with about 4000 employees spread all over the world.

In 1977 they presented a joint paper describing a statistical methodology in risk assessment of lending to a particular consumer based on how the credit history of that consumer compared to the statistical norms of a large pool of consumer data in several key areas. That paper led to their FICO risk assessment model and algorithm.

The FICO is an actuarial model.

Originally posted by Caitlyn Coyle:

Which came first--FICO is unreliable and so invited gaming, or gaming made FICO unreliable?

Gaming makes the FICO unreliable. The risk model, as a model, is sound. It is the data and the assumptions of the behavior the data represent that are the problem.

The thing that makes FICO scoring contemptible is that the punishment (demerits for derogatory data) doesn't always fit the crime (incorrect data). That is, if you're having a beef with a creditor--as I am at this very moment over a $244 Verizon bill I don't owe--one's FICO score can be as compromised as if I filed bankruptcy and skipped out on ALL my debts! In other words, the infamous Score Factor Code #22--"serious delinquency, derogatory public record or collection filed"--makes no distinction!

There are so many things functionally wrong with FICO scoring that it INVITES "gaming." While the majority of consumers deserve their score, for those who don't, gaming becomes a fine art that is soon disseminated throughout the Internet and reduced to a formula approach for which crusaders like Brian Diaz hope to make a darn good living.

I recall an article in Gentlemens Quarterly where they took bums off Skid Row, cleaned them up, dressed them in cool expensive clothes and took professional photos. You couldn't distinguish them from anyone on this board. Didn't change them from being bums but they sure looked good.

Likewise, when credit is "cleaned," the lender often gets a deadbeat who likely won't change his spots. The problem is that there's not enough flexibility in FICO scoring to rescue consumers from its very real shortcomings. For example, why should I pay a higher interest rate for thirty years just because FICO scoring can't distinguish a small contested collection account from someone who walked on 40K of valid debt?

That is why I only work with lenders who will manually underwrite. I pay my bills on time and when incorrect information appears on my credit report I dispute it as everyone should. My problem with the gaming of the system is the removal of correct information that just makes the borrower look bad.

Personally, I'd like to see the fraud statutes extended to cover the case where someone disputes an item they know, or should know, is true.

My solution? Fight the bureaus tooth and nail and dispute, dispute, dispute. One of us will get tired and it's not going to be me. While I'm at it, I'll dispute the valid derogs (if any), too. Because one credit derog is the same hit to one's score as a hundred, it's SOP to dispute everything.

&%$#@! FICO.

The dispute of valid derogatory entries is what I find contemptible.

Talk to the broker in the office.

If that doesn't work, talk to the owner who listed their house with an agency who is ignoring their fiduciary duty with malice and callous disregard for the damage the seller will suffer from a foreclosure.

Originally posted by Caitlyn Coyle:

Folks, the entire reason that FICO scores were mandated by Fannie/Freddie was to remove underwriter bias from approval decisions.

That same type of "bias removal" is why we have kids being suspended from school for drawing pictures of knives or even worse because they bring a plastic knife to school to spread peanut butter.

The FICO model was no longer a reliable predictor of risk once there was widespread success at gaming the system. When FICO scores were artificially inflated by "credit repair" schemes it became totally useless as a risk predictor tool.