Smokers have been attacked from all directions in recent years but there was a time when the best carriages on trains were reserved for smokers. There were smoking lounges in the best hotels. People who smoked were not just cool, they were the pace setters. There were even spittoons in public places where you could spit out your tobacco after chewing it. This is not the case anymore as today’s smokers are increasingly being treated as outcasts. Why has this dramatic change in attitude occurred? It was found that smokers died earlier than those who didn’t smoke and life insurance companies were one of the first organisations to act on this information.

Life insurance companies survive on the basis of being able to forecast accurately how long the majority of their policy holders will live. They base their premiums on this assumption and if they get it wrong their profitability falls. The only way they can get back on top again is to raise their premiums. However, to the benefit of non-smokers, when it was universally accepted that smokers generally died earlier than non-smokers, it was only the smokers who were made to pay for the extra risk they were carrying.

This is why it is so important that a smoker can not be allowed to fraudulently state they don’t smoke when applying for life insurance when in actual fact they do. If an over-abundance of policy holders did this the future viability of the insurance company itself would be challenged. If that happened thousands of policy holders, if not hundreds of thousands of policy holders, would run the risk of not having their beneficiaries paid should they die while legitimately covered.
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Recession, credit crunch debt crises, subprime lending and the list go on with words that frequently made headlines during the last 4 years. Well, what it all boils down to is that lending money to an unsuitable candidate is bad for everyone, for the lending institution, the borrower and the economy in general. There may be those who miss the good times in 2005-2007 when money was abundant and banks were lending to anyone. The reality, however, is that this was never sustainable and should never have happened, and the strict lending criteria that we have today are a good thing. Getting and maintaining a clean credit score is not very difficult, and there are even some sneaky tricks you can use to get a great credit score.

How is the Credit Score Calculated?

There are five areas that determine your credit score. These are:

• Mix of credit
• Payment history
• Debt levels
• Age of credit
• Recent credit

Now, many people out there look at these five factors and feel comfortable that they are managing well on each of them, and therefore take it for granted that they have a good credit history. Never take your credit history for granted as mistakes are made all the time, and you may not be maximizing your credit score and therefore checking will help you track this.
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