Here’s the clip of yours truly, Ben Popken, on Fox Business News discussing some of the changes in store for FICO ’08, the credit-scoring system lenders use to determine how punitive a rate they get to charge you. You may notice that I have a strange look on my face at the beginning. That’s because I was trying to put on a winning smile for when the camera went over to me but my face was twitching like Elvis’ lip and so I tried to go for a sideways grin but it didn’t come out quite right. For how FICO ’08 could affect your credit score, check out this post.

At the end we mess up and tell people to go to annualcreditreport.com for your credit score but then catch ourselves and say you can go directly to FICO.com for your score. It’s important when trying to buy your credit score to read all the fine print because a lot of different places try to sign you up for a credit monitoring service that charges a monthly fee (including FICO.com). Check out this post, especially the comments, for places to get your score. Some credit cards will even give you your score for free. The other important thing to remember is that FICO ’08 has only been distributed to one of the three credit bureaus so far, it may not be until later this year that these changes will fully go into effect.

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