Kind-of-Lost

Revolving Utilization: What It Is and How to Fix It

Buyers often ask me which tradeline will help them the most. Before I answer, I usually ask one question back: what does your revolving utilization look like? If it’s high, a tradeline with a big limit can move your score faster than almost anything else. If it’s already low, the math works differently and we should be looking at age instead. Understanding revolving utilization is where that conversation always starts, because it’s the single fastest-moving part of your credit score.

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Two lessons from Diego Maradona’s life

Maradona died a few days ago and I was surprised by how sad the news made me. He was the best soccer player of his generation, and then some. One of the best ever, if not the best.

He had a long career on and off the field and many ups and downs in both. He ran into trouble several times because he was a rebel and disliked authority very much (hmm I just discovered one thing we had in common). I am not a soccer expert (heck, I am not an expert at anything, I am kind of lost after all) but I drew two lessons from all the memories I just reminisced about in the last couple of days and all the comments I heard and read.

How much will a tradeline boost my credit? The honest answer

Buyers ask me this all the time — it’s the first question after price. And I get it. You’re about to spend real money on something with no guaranteed outcome, and you want at least a rough idea of what you’re buying. The honest answer is that it depends on your existing profile, and anyone quoting you a flat number is either guessing or selling you on a guarantee they can’t back up. What I can do is walk you through how the math actually works, what limits a tradeline’s impact, and show you a real customer result at the bottom.

Cashvertising (book review)

Are you tired of your marketing efforts falling flat? Do you want to know the secrets to create compelling ads that actually convert? Look no further than “Cashvertising” by Drew Eric Whitman.

As a seasoned copywriter with over a decade of experience, Whitman knows a thing or two about crafting messages that resonate with consumers. And lucky for us, he’s shared his expertise in “Cashvertising”, a must-read for anyone looking to up their advertising game.

The 6 W’s Explained: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How

The six W’s are six questions — who, what, when, where, why and how — that you ask about a problem before you try to solve it. They come out of journalism, where a reporter has to establish the facts of a story, and they got adopted into continuous improvement work for exactly the same reason: you cannot fix something you haven’t described properly.

I spent most of my working life as an operations research analyst, building models for manufacturing and supply chain problems. And the honest lesson from all of it is that the modeling was rarely the hard part. Getting a straight answer to these six questions was the hard part.

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