If you have no credit history or a thin file, the two products everyone recommends are a credit builder loan and a secured credit card, and the honest answer to which one works faster is that they build your score in different ways, not at different speeds. The first is reported as an installment account, … Read more
If a lender ever turned you down and you pulled your credit report only to find an account that isn’t yours or a balance that’s just wrong, you’ve found a real credit report error, and you’re not alone. The FTC’s own congressionally mandated study found that one in five consumers has at least one confirmed … Read more
If you’ve been putting off checking your credit report because you’re worried an old hospital bill is dragging your score down, here’s the real answer: whether medical debt on your credit report can still hurt you depends on which state you live in, how much you owe, and whether it’s already been paid — not … Read more
Does debt consolidation work, or does it just trade one debt for a slower-motion version of the same problem? That question got fresh national attention this week, when a wave of local news coverage warned that rolling credit card debt into a personal loan can backfire if the spending habits underneath it never change. Americans … Read more
Buy now pay later statistics tell a more complicated story than the “debt trap” headlines suggest. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond’s own 2026 research brief, BNPL loans actually charged off at a lower rate than credit cards in the most recent year measured — 1.83% versus 4.19%. And yet the same research … Read more
Student loan payment increases are about to hit millions of borrowers at once. Roughly 7.5 million people enrolled in the SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education) plan have until September 29, 2026 to pick a new repayment plan — or the Education Department will automatically move them into the standard 10-year plan, typically the highest … Read more
How much debt do Americans have right now? The New York Fed’s Q2 2026 Household Debt and Credit Report puts the number at $18.8 trillion total — a small 0.1% dip from the previous quarter, the first decrease in a while. Spread evenly across the roughly 134.8 million households in the U.S., that works out … Read more
What credit score do you need for a used car loan? The honest answer is that it depends entirely on which tier you land in, and the gap between tiers is bigger than most shoppers expect. According to Experian’s State of the Automotive Finance Market report for the first quarter of 2026, someone with super-prime … Read more
Is credit card delinquency rising, or is a scary-sounding headline number telling only part of the story? According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 12.8% of credit card balances were 90 or more days past due as of the first quarter of 2026, up sharply from 7.6% back in late 2022 — a … Read more
Is credit card debt normal, or does it just feel that way because everyone around you seems to be carrying some? The numbers say it’s the second one, and they came out just this week: total U.S. credit card balances climbed to $1.26 trillion in the second quarter of 2026, according to the New York … Read more