Jeff Sipes's Blog

  This month, your friends at Blue Water Credit are committed to saving you money.  Last week we covered a financial checklist to savings, and now we’ll look at ten ways to save big $$$ on your energy bills.   Before you go down this list in earnest, collect your monthly bills and put them in one...

Face it, we’re all looking to cut costs somehow, whether it’s just to make spend less than we make and get by, or because we should be putting more away for retirement and the kids’ college.  So your friends at BlueWaterCredit.com put together a comprehensive checklist of ways you could possibly...

An Oregon woman was awarded an $18.6 million from a federal jury in a highly unusual, and possibly precedent setting, civil lawsuit.  Julie Miller of Marion County was granted the mammoth settlement after struggling for two years to get the credit bureau Equifax Information Services to correct m...

These days it seems like a warming real estate market is all the talk, with appreciation driving prices higher with all of the vigor we saw a decade ago, before the real estate bubble let us all down.  However, appreciation comes and goes, but some markets hold their value no matter what the eco...

If we’re listening to Fannie Mae, the jump in mortgage interest rates over the last weeks will have little or no impact on home prices.  The mortgage giant released a report that studies the history of interest rates and the housing market all the way back to 1990, concluding that higher rates m...

  The financial markets always keep a close eye on Fed activity, but lately it’s become downright crucial.  Even in May and June, when chairman Ben Bernanke announced that the Fed would eventually ease back on its aggressive efforts to keep credit flowing, once the economy started to rebuild, Wal...

It’s summertime!  That means plenty of sweltering weather, dips in the pool, and taking the kids to the beach.  But we have one more inevitable ritual of the dog days: high has prices.  It seems every summer gas prices swell higher than the mercury on our thermostats, leaving us scratching our h...

It’s estimated that almost 1.5 million homeowners have gone through a short sale in the last 5 years, yet many of those are reporting incorrectly on their credit reports as foreclosures.  The difference between a short sale or a foreclosure reported on a credit report can cost a borrower valuable...

      1. You don’t need to pay to see your credit report.   Most of us have been charged to pull our credit report at some time, or go onto one of those “free” sites, only to be hit with a $15 hidden fee to see the full report.  But according to the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (the...

Determining a credit score is a tricky business, since there are thousands of credit scoring models in use, each fitting a consumer into their particular model.  But they all are trying to predict the same basic thing: the likelihood of a consumer being 90 days late on any payment within the next...