Once again I've let the blog go on too long without a post. This is getting to be like my gym membership! J/K, my gym membership is free, so I don't feel guilty about not going to the gym for monetary reasons. However, I should still exercise more, and I should still post more as well. To be fair I've been out at sea for about half the time since I moved to Japan, but typepad has an email post feature that I'm going to try and take advantage of in the future.
So where am I know now in terms of finance? Not surprisingly I've been doing well since coming to Japan. While I pay more for housing and life's necessities like food and transportation, I'm also being compensated more for the cost of living difference. The networthIQ badge shows almost steady growth (baring a few stock market ups and downs).
Recently I've also taken care of a few personal finance basics. I picked up a money magazine at the airport during some of my recent travels, and while most of the financial advice it gave was stuff I already knew, sometimes you have to be reminded. That's why I just got my credit report from www.annualcreditreport.com. My credit situation hasn't changed much, but you should check for errors every 4 months or so and It's been about 9 months since I last checked.
Along those same lines I finally signed up for creditkarma.com. It's a web site that will check your credit with one of the bureuas and give you a free fico score. I've heard good things about it, but hadn't tried it until now. I found the site was pretty easy to use, and gave some good advise and tips about how to manage you credit limit. The only piece of advice I didn't agree with is the sugestion that you should open lots of credit accounts to improve your score. While this will increase you lower you credit to debt ratio, I think having many accounts exposes you to more risk. Another interesting thing it does is track fico history. I'll log in again in a couple of months to see if it has an update.
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