patrick.net

@Ha Ha,

My credit score is bigger than yours. Wanna compare? On the other hand, it's not the score that matters, but how you use it. ; )

Muggy said:
I wouldn’t have recognized my realtor without his mug on his card.

That's a plausible theory for how the practice may have originated, but it doesn't explain why they insist on putting it on _every_ page of a 12 month calendar.

One idiot who does business in Fremont handed me a card with his picture taken in front of some lame painting of a Swiss alpine landscape. "Ohh wow - looks like your head is floating over Zermatt! Please help me buy a home!" Didn't happen.

SP

Jon said:
Explain that you’ll pass her name around your office and that you know lots of people interested in buying a house and stupid shit like that.

They lap this up. In fact, it is a prime reason why I don't wear anything with my company's logo when I go to check out an open house.

SP

Correction:
"my company" == "my company where I work".

Not to be misunderstood as "my company that I own"

SP

Then she actually shows up and it’s fuckin’ Skeletor.

LOL.

My question is what is my combined credit score?

I heard that they are taking the middle score.

I do not know why my scores are not as high. I pay off credit cards every month, I have a lot of unused credit and I do not have late payments.

816

Peter P Says:

I do not know why my scores are not as high. I pay off credit cards every month, I have a lot of unused credit and I do not have late payments.

My understanding is that more than unused credit, a history of paying off debt and/or servicing costs (interest) in a timely fashion gives you the high credit score (on top of everything else basic, like no defaults, etc.) Hence, when we closed out our mortgage after sale and now rent, our credit score went down slightly.

But mine's still bigger than Ha Ha's.

Hence, when we closed out our mortgage after sale and now rent, our credit score went down slightly.

I guess I would have to buy a house for it to exceed 800 then. :(

@tannenbaum,
Thanks for the link. I don't read the Chron regularly - I can't stomach the bad writing.

What amazes me about Google's continued media/investor darling status is that, they are basically a very good search engine and advertising venue. Why should that result in stock valuation in the hundreds per share, overshadowing many old-line industrials and DJIA component companies?

I read a while ago that a significant portion of Google's revenue comes merely from re-investment of its cash from other investors. The YouTube deal just highlights this. Remember back when Google would "do no evil" and refused advertisers on the search home page?

Skibum,

No.....no....no. If you pay off your debts early, your credit score will go down because you are not living up to your end of the agreement and not allow the creditor the projected profit.....FACT.

They do look at all the other BS; but I found out about this little factor when I got pissed at my mortgage company and wrote a check to pay off my loan......score went down just over 20 pts.

When I was in business, I was a CC company's worst nightmare. Free card w/benefits and would charge about $20k/month......and then pay in full each month so I would not pay interest. The bank did everything they could to talk me into the wonderful debit card to save me from having to write a check each month....LOL I asked the branch VP why in the hell would I want to stop using their money for free and getting paid to do it.....would he? The last I checked, his face was a blank stare as I chuckled and left the lobby. I *LIVE* for moments like that.

Doug H,
You read my post wrong. I said *exactly* what you are saying. Keeping open loans and credit lines (mortgage, credit cards) increases your credit score, as you continue to pay the payments on time. Paying them off and closing them removes from your credit record any trace of your timely payment history. Why else would I have used my example of paying off my mortgage resulting in a decrease in my credit score?

Can you folks get the Bay Area Hippies to stop protesting the war long enough to help the military with this problem?

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15239501/?GT1=8618

Can you folks get the Bay Area Hippies to stop protesting the war long enough to help the military with this problem?

Afghan marijuana plants? I say burn them down!

SFWoman Says:

> Just in case I ever have to become a Realtor
> I am saving a really great photo of myself,
> taken in 1987, where I look attractive, yet intelligent
> and as thought I’d work for your best interest.

Many of my sisters friends have started using “old” (aka thinner and hotter) photos on match.com to get more dates and don’t want to listen to me when I point out that:

1. It’s “false advertising”
2. They may be getting more “dates” but they are still single…

SQT,

I feel exactly the same way about husband and wife realtor "teams." A little diversification please! They're probably the kind of people who used to invest their entire 401(K) in the same (pets.com) company where they work and receive all their healthcare coverage.

SFWoman Says:

> Could somebody please help our mayor select his girlfriends?
> First we had his wife, rather self promoting, their magazine
> spread made everybody laugh at them. Then he goes and
> dates a Scientologist. WTF? Now he is dating either an
> under aged drinker or girl who lies about her age (by seven
> years) on myspace.

Gavin and his 20 year old (as of a few weeks ago) girlfriend Brittanie Mountz is the top story on sfgate.com

Just think if they get married and she goes in to real estate she can put her picture on bus stops and Marina Safeway shopping carts with the (dirty sounding) name:

Brittanie Mountz Newsom…

P.S. Someone needs to tell Gavin the “1/2 your age + 7 rule” (since it is weird for a guy to date someone younger than half his age + seven years)…

A little diversification please!

How about a husband-and-wife of mortgage-and-real-estate agents? In case real estate goes down, there is still mortgage.

I mean a mortgage to pay... :)

20 year old Brittanie Mountz - you can't make this stuff up!

Brittanie Mountz Newsom…

Don't forget that Newsom's family owns "Plumpjack's"...

What's Plumpjack's?

A Winery - thanks Google

FormerAptBroker:

That's hillarious!

I guess there's a Plumpjack’s Inn as well.

@Jon: Yeah, I know what you're sayin' about the whole online dating thing. It ain't exactly a truthful environment (but then, is that any different from regular dating?). My favorite is all the ladies who list their body type as "Athletic and Toned". Apparently you can be 20 lbs. overweight, but still be athletic and toned. One told me, "I go to the gym at least three times per week," as if you can claim athleticism based solely on trying.

My personal experience was that I got a lot of attention when I first joined, but a disproportionate number of girls were suggesting very nice restaurants that I wouldn't normally consider first date settings. On a hunch, I set my Salary to "No Answer". Boy, did that drop the hits quick. So be warned, folks, there's gold(diggers) in them thar hills!

I guess money talks. But that's why we're all on this blog anyway, right? :)

skibum Says:

> Don’t forget that Newsom’s family owns “Plumpjack’s”…

The Newsom family has just “worked” at Plumpjack, other than a small minority interest none of the Newsom’s have ever owned much of the Plumpjack empire.

Plumpjack was started by Billioneer Gordon Getty (who named the company after an opera he wrote) and he picked Gavin to pretend run things along with his son Billy while he paid professionals to actually run things.

Getty picked Newsom pretended to run things to thank his Dad who stepped up in the 70’s and risked his life doing a ransom drop in Italy to get Getty’s nephew back from kidnappers and since his son Billy did so much blow he was rarely in any condition to even pretend to run things.

After Newsom pretended to run things at Plumpjack for a while Willie Brown and the Burton machine did some surveys that found out that women and gays overwhelmingly thought that Newsom was cute (and would vote for him) so they put him in to politics while they continue to professionals to actually run things.

While Gavin never did any more than “pretend to run things” I’ve heard from the people at Plumpjack that his Mom (who was on the Plumpjack payroll when she died) and his sister (who’s mother in law is a RW and has her face plastered all over town http://www.streetsofsanfrancisco.com/ )
actually worked hard for the company…

Doug H Says:

> No…..no….no. If you pay off your debts early, your
> credit score will go down because you are not living
> up to your end of the agreement and not allow the
> creditor the projected profit…..FACT.
> They do look at all the other BS; but I found out about
> this little factor when I got pissed at my mortgage
> company and wrote a check to pay off my loan……
> score went down just over 20 pts.

You don’t need any debt to have a very high (top 1% credit score). I’m sure it is a fact that Doug’s score dropped when he paid off his loan, but the drop probably had more to do with the “change” in the credit profile than the lack of debt. I’ve been friends with a guy since undergrad (when he helped me get through statistics) who works at Fair Isaac he has told me a few things (even though he is not supposed to ever talk about the back end of the model that he works on with the other math guys). Stable people have high scores (like people who slowly pay off loans or people who never get loans). You never want to close an account unless it is an open line of credit more than three times your annual income. The model will give you bonus points for having a Macy’s card for 10 years, but will take a way points based on the $5K limit of the Macy’s card since it represents $5K potential debt that can get you in trouble. It is not until the limits get huge (around 3x your income) that the “potential debt” subtracts more than the “open account in good standing for years” adds…

> When I was in business, I was a CC company’s worst
> nightmare. Free card w/benefits and would charge
> about $20k/month……and then pay in full each month
> so I would not pay interest.

If you were charging $20K a month the credit card company was probably making about $5K a year in merchant fees… Not exactly the “worst nightmare” say compared to the guy who charges $20K a month for five months then gets the debt wiped out in BK…

Former,

Since I took CC as well as used them, my contract was for 1.38% plus 27 cents/transaction.....so do the math and you'll have their top line profit from my activity. Then subtract the money cost from the balance to get the bottom line cost/profit.

Oh, your extreme example would be the WORST nightmare; but my point is my, or anyone else, who uses CC as free money is something they abhor. Minimum payments @ 22% is being a good little CC customer.

ajh said:
Hopefully all 50.

shouldn't that be 7??? Here's a gratuitous article on ongoing declining affordability and perth and darwin rapidly playing out...

ahh, canberra, mainframe dinosaur, things are getting clearer now... (i'm actually in a very similar boat)

if you really want to use a spreadsheet, microsoft map is integrated into excel, i believe. going onto the web, perhaps use either google or M$ mappoint, which bloated cashcow do you want to support?

DS said:
going onto the web, perhaps use either google or M$ mappoint, which bloated cashcow do you want to support?

I have an idea - perhaps you could suggest a nice little communist venture that provides the kind of features that these 'bloated cashcows' do at no cost to ajh.

Yeah, I didn't think so.

SP

Doug H

I went to B School with a guy in CC finance. According to him the CC debt issuers lose significantly on customers who pay in full each cycle. The transactional fees mostly go to the big network companies -- ironically they are being scrutinized right now for antitrust & collusion. Visa or MC will take a very sizable per txn cut leaving the lenders (which are banks and such) only the interest, late fees and add-ons to make any profit on. This is also the reason why most such lenders will keep jacking your credit limit if you pay in full, as they know that statistically a certain number of "monthly payers" will eventually get stuck for a few months in the case of some hardship. At that point, they can recover a lot of lost interest in just a couple of months, due to the huge balance.

I have an idea - perhaps you could suggest a nice little communist venture that provides the kind of features that these ‘bloated cashcows’ do at no cost to ajh.

SP

perhaps it wouldn’t matter in my ideal socia1ist co-operative utopia (not the repressive totalitarian command capitalist regimes of the 2nd world), because there wouldn’t be a housing affordability crisis and home ownership issue to whinge about in the first place… altho the soviets had quite a few technical firsts in their time, not bad coming from a largely pre-industrial agrarian society… remember who put sputnik up and the first animal in space… and excellent architectural software products like ArchiCAD have come out of places like hungary...

but i suppose you could choose google ‘don’t be evil’ — except when being paid to filter content by the chinese — or M$ for the flow-on to the bill and melinda gates foundation…

other than that, the poster’s comment was gratuitous, and exposits an extreme position that I’ve certainly never taken… aka the ’straw man’ argument in rhetorical philosophy…

DS

@FAB,
A minor points about Plumpjacks. You always like to make your statements with such apparent authority:

The Newsom family has just “worked” at Plumpjack, other than a small minority interest none of the Newsom’s have ever owned much of the Plumpjack empire.

How do you explain this from their website:

http://www.plumpjack.com/history.html

Closer to home, San Francisco composer and philanthropist, Gordon Getty, wrote an opera he called "Plump Jack." The fun-loving and irreverent spirit of PlumpJack clearly excited the sensibilities of Gordon's close friend and business associate, Gavin Newsom.

PlumpJack was founded by Gavin Newsom, whose personality is revealed in response to an expression of concern upon his first appointment to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors in 1997. '

Do you just make shit up as you go along?

I wrote:

> The Newsom family has just “worked” at
> Plumpjack, other than a small minority interest
> none of the Newsom’s have ever owned much
> of the Plumpjack empire.

Then skibum Says:

> How do you explain this from their website:
> http://www.plumpjack.com/history.html

The web site is “correct” that Newsom "founded" Plumpjack (since Gordon Getty has always called him a "founder"). The Newsom's campaign web site was also “correct” when it said he was "raised by a "single mother" (since his Mom never re-married, but unlike most kids raised by “single mothers” he grew up surrounded by Millionaires (too many to list), Billionaires (the Getty’s), Celebrities (including his Uncle Ed Asner) and Politicians (including his cousin Nancy Pelosi).

Gavin is a nice guy, but his family does not "own" Plumpjack (when he was running for Mayor the campaign finance disclosure forms showed how little he owned). If you want to find out how much effort he put in to "founding" the company talk to the real estate owners that leased the space or the early staff that worked there...

P.S. The Chronicle reported a while back that Gordon Getty personally owned 96 percent of the Plumpjack winery and 96 percent of the partnership that runs the (kid friendly according to SF Woman) Plumpjack Squaw Valley Inn

http://www.sfist.com/archives/2006/09/07/gavins_back.php

"The intriguingly-spelled Brittanie Mountz, who played women's lacrosse for Sonoma State. "

Brittanie Mountz is definitely no BMW 7 series.

hee hee - i'm only halfway there...

On another OT note, last night for about an hour and a half two enormous black helicopters flew in very tight circles over a couple of blocks on the eastern side of Pacific Heights.

some sort of black op... probably escorting alien spacecraft... or giving elvis the sightseeing tour he requested...

SFWoman Says:
On another OT note, last night for about an hour and a half two enormous black helicopters flew in very tight circles over a couple of blocks on the eastern side of Pacific Heights. ... Why would helicopters fly in tight circles like that for such a long time?

Aah, that was probably just heli-Ben. So that is how they get people to buy Pacific Heights condos for 2.5M, I guess. :-)

SP

Speaking of self promoting "His & Her" real estate "teams" I just heard a golden one.

The couple that owns our local mini mart are the nicest people. They moved up to OR from Sacramento several years ago and they're well liked and respected here. Because they were new to the area they bought a double wide on it's own lot just a few blocks from their store. After a while they asked the same realtor (TM) that got a comm. for selling them their house if they could buy the vacant lot next door so their kids could have some place to play.

Long story short, he/she not only do not sell her the lot but they buy the house next door, sub-divide the lot, slap up a McMansion and do a cosmetic flip on the aging adjoining house! Oh yeah!

Now, not only does she not get the lot for her kids to play there is a McAlbatross "shoe-horned" where there was a vacant lot and their "flip" would be better off being burned to the ground. (Built 1905) and occupied for years by elderly man and badly neglected. With friends like this, who can afford enemies! Oh, btw you can't so much as push your shopping cart without seeing this couples mugs plastered all over it! How do these people live with themselves? Forget it. I want out. The whole "process" sucks.

Obviously this nice couple's needs did not fit well with the designs/needs/wants/desires of Mr. & Mrs. Realt-whore/s! Evidently serving clients needs are not a very high priority for most realt-whores and as shown in this particular incident (you wind up giving them ideas and then having to compete against them!)

I guess if the realt-whores had went to the effort to get the lot sub-divided for them there wouldn't have been all that much of a commission in it for them and how would they have sold them YET ANOTHER house when they'd have ample room for addition/expansion? (The way these pukes look at it they'd be screwing themselves TWICE by not looking after their own interests!)

I don't want to start the week off on the wrong foot but every time I see a husband/wife "team" all I see is the potential to get gang raped.