I learned something from Suze Orman, other than that she doesn't know how to title a book.

Credit scores made no sense to me, other than I knew that they pissed me off.

But Elise's grandparents bought her this Suze Orman book with an embarassing title. (The Money Book for the Young Broke and Fabulous)

I skimmed through the entire thing last night and the book as a whole makes no sense to me. Not what she is saying, just the actual format of the book. It's clearly written for teens, and yet devotes an entire eighth of the book to retirement. I have a feeling that she's just recycling some of her past books work into a new candy colored teen version that took little to no effort.

That said, the first chapter is exactly what I've wanted to know for years. A concise explanation of credit scores and exactly how they are derived. Finally.

That said, other than that I now have two low-limit high-interest credit cards... quite honestly, I don't see how I could have built that much credit.

Earlier this week, I was approved for Cingular service with no deposit, a free camera-phone and $150 cash back.

Today, I called to schedule switching the power into my name at the apartment. The woman said, "It's going to be a $185 deposit unless you want me to run your credit and in some instances the credit check will allow us to waive that deposit." It didn't sound promising. In fact, I started to panic because even though I had just read Suze Orman's book... I wasn't sure if running up too many credit checks was a bad thing. We all know that applying for too many credit cards is, so I'm not sure about credit checks in general. Lord knows that with this apartment I've had A LOT of credit checks in the past few weeks.

But of course I had to go for the credit check, because who knows? I was just approved by Cingular, so I must be doing something right.

"You must be doing something right!" the woman said when it all went through. The deposit, waived.

I am confounded by all of this. When the heck did this happen?

According to that book, 35% of your credit score is based on paying your bills on time. Credit card bills, phone bills, any and all bills that you have. It's the biggest percentage of your credit score, but up until I was accepted for my first credit card ten months ago, I have never had ANY bills.

Now I have two credit card bills, apartment rent, the cell phone, cable, power, water... but I've yet to have actually been billed for anything other than the credit cards.

The only thing I can think of is... our Netflix DVDs, they were always addressed to me. It was technically MY account, even though the account was attached to my mother's debit card. Could that have been building my credit the whole time? Something to think about. Might be a nice little way to build credit.