Do Business Well

Your credit record is your financial reputation. If you want to rent an apartment, buy a house, get a phone hooked up, get a credit card, take out a loan, buy a blimp, or start a business, you need a good record.

A company that wants to check your credit can call other companies that have done money deals with you in the past, or they can get a report from a credit reporting bureau. But if you’ve never been granted credit in the past, you don’t have a credit record. Where do you start?

Fortunately, you don’t always need a credit record. Some credit grantors realize that no record is better than a bad one. If you don’t have one, they’ll look more carefully at other information on your credit application: Continue Reading »

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Shoppers wanting to get their caffeine fix online at www.starbucks.com now have only one path to take when they pay for their beans. If they are already registered with Passport, Microsoft’s new identity-verification program, they can use it to complete their purchase. If not, they are directed to a site where they can sign up for Passport. Passport is being marketed as a ‘one-click’ solution to obtaining access to Web sites requiring registration and to make purchases over the Internet.This means that shoppers cannot buy their coffee without letting Microsoft be part of the transaction. Starbucks used to let shoppers pay for their purchases by credit card, but in May 2001 it joined fifty other affiliated sites and switched to Passport. Now the personal information of every Starbucks.com buyer is stored in Microsoft’s vast database. Continue Reading »

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