Your credit score can make or break your ability to buy a house, rent an apartment, or even land a job, but do you actually know how that three-digit number gets calculated? Vivian breaks down the wild, biased history of credit scoring and gives you the real playbook for building, or rebuilding, a great score. 

In this episode, Vivian covers:

1. The history of credit scores, from Mesopotamian debt tablets, to the 1841 Mercantile Agency, to the birth of FICO in 1956, to the anti-discrimination laws that (kind of) fixed things

2. How to actually build credit, secured credit cards, credit-builder loans, rent and utility reporting, becoming an authorized user, and the five factors FICO uses to calculate your score

3. The system's blind spots, and what to do if your score takes an unexpected hit

Interested in checking your credit score? Head to https://www.annualcreditreport.com

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