Remember when you were a kid and you’d get your report card or progress report? You would either run straight home to show mom and dad or you would run straight in the other direction. It’s helpful to know where you stand but it can also be downright frightening; sometimes there is information that we may feel better off know not knowing at all.

But the premise of the report card was to give a benchmark against which future work can be measured. Today, while we are adults who very rarely have to deal with report cards per se – unless we are in a school program – we still have to deal with many methods of measuring ourselves; be it the reviews we get at work or the credit report that details our financial behavior.

The credit report tends to be far more dreaded, in fact, than the report cards of years’ past. It is a mirror into which most of us are not comfortable looking; and it can detail roads traveled and mistakes made that are hard to face to say the least.

As with anything else, the not knowing can actually stand to compound the behavior. In other words, we may not know what our credit report says and so it’s easy enough to go and spend money we don’t have or make other poor choices figuring that we’ll just deal with it all later. But when you have a sense of what your credit report says it becomes much more difficult to make those choices. The reality of a credit report can be much more powerful than the fantasy of what we think that credit report says when we have our head stuck in the sand. Getting real about finances can put you on the road to progress.

More in the next post…

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