20% off 3 FICO scores until October 22nd

The myFico website is running a sale right now for 20% off of your 3 FICO scores. The sale runs until October 22nd.

Credit Crisis Concerns? Get 20% off FICO credit scores now [ dead link]



Here is their description of the offer:

"It can be harder to get loans these days, even if you have a great FICO score. Over 90% of lenders use FICO credit scores, among other factors, to determine your credit risk. Make sure you're putting your best foot forward by knowing your FICO scores and taking steps to better manage your credit.
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Offer ends October 22nd, 2008"


This is a pretty good price for all 3 FICO scores. If you want the actual FICO scores you generally have to pay and it is usually $15-16 each for them. If you haven't done so then I'd also strongly recommend you check your annual credit report via the governments website. For that go to AnnualCreditReport Be careful of other private companies advertising free credit scores, what they are usually doing is pitching a montly or annual subscription to a paid product with a free trial period.

FICO scores and credit report are separate things. The FICO score is the number from 300 to 850 with higher being better. The credit report is a summary of all the credit transactions and standing for your open accounts but it has no credit score.

Historical prices of gold

With all the economic problems we've had lately some people are turning to gold as an investment or potential safe harbor for their money. Gold has increased significantly in the past few years. Gold has doubled in value since 2005 and had an annual growth rate of about 26% from 2005 to 2008. That really is a good return especially compared to the stock market and real estate which have both dropped in the same time. Its not uncommon to see people arguing that gold is where you should put your money. But how has gold performed as an investment long term in the past?

To get historical gold prices lets look at the Kitco website. They have historical prices for gold dating back to 1833.

If you look at the yearly charts and data for 1833 to 1999 you can see that gold moved very little in price for the period 1833 to 1971. Gold was $20.65 an ounce in 1833 and it was $40.80 an ounce in 1971. From 1930 to 1971 gold grew in value at an annual rate of 1.7%. Before the 1970's gold saw little increase in value.

For the 1970's and later gold started to increase. From 1970 to 2008 gold grew at an average annual compound growth rate of 8.8%.

Here is a chart showing gold prices from 1970 to 2008:


The price was quite volatile over the years and saw increases in 66% of years and decreases in 33% of years. Here is a chart showing the annual percentage change in gold prices:

Right now gold prices are in a boom. Doubling value in 3 years is a very high growth rate. Its hard to time the market, but we know busts inevitably follow booms. Historic trends for gold are not quite as positive. Gold peaked in 1980 at $612. It then dropped to the $300-400 level for several years and dropped down below $300 in the early nineties. If you had put money into gold in 1980 at $612 and held onto it until today your average annual return would be just 1.1%.

Gold prices are volatile and returns on gold investments have not been attractive over the years. In my opinion gold is not a solid investment. It has high risk and does not have consistent high return.

For more data on gold historic prices see the Kitco website

If you found this article interesting then you might want to check out the following:

• Has World Gold Production Peaked?
• My 2¢ - Gold Peaked Over a Year Ago
• Is Gold a good Infation hedge?
• Gold versus Oil prices from 1970 to today
• Cash4Gold = ripoff
• Would you buy this mutual fund?

Foreclosure counts per city on Zillow

The website Zillow.com has listings of houses for sale and it also has the foreclosure homes as well. So you can do a search for an individual city or zip code and then filter it by foreclosures to see the foreclosures in that area. Doing this you can see a rough number for the amount of foreclosures in a city.

For example if I search for Anaheim, California and look for foreclosures it says there are 11,555 foreclosures out of 35,678 total homes. That means that 32% of the homes for sale in Anaheim were foreclosures.

Note that the data on Zillow is not comprehensive and it may be lacking information. I don't know where they get the foreclosure and for sale numbers so it may be lacking some of either. So this is just a rough estimate of foreclosure rates.

Foreclosure listings on Zillow for some randomly selected cities around the country in alphabetical order:

Anaheim, CA = 11,555 out of 35,678 = 32%
Atlanta GA=5742 out of 31808 = 18%
Baltimore, MD =637 out of 12580 = 5%
Boise, ID =1090 out of 12985 = 8%
Cheyenne WY= 31 out of 390 = 8%
Cleveland OH = 1963 out of 11194 = 17.5%
Dallas, TX =10294 out of 46577 = 22%
Denver, CO =8472 out of 24082 = 35%
Detroit MI=7375 out of 26513 = 27.8%
Fargo, SD =28 out of 1826 = 1.5%
Las Vegas = 13453 out of 27837 = 48%
Madison, WI =47 out of 5316 = 0.8%
Nashville TN =619 out of 14003 = 4%
Oklahoma city, OK= 1141 out of 9740 = 11.7%
Orlando FL =3026 out of 18316 = 16.5%
Pittsburgh PA = 368 out of 3802 = 9.6%
Portland OR =1454 out of 15786 = 9%
Richmond VA = 213 out of 3747 = 5.6%
Syracuse, NY =82 out of 1332 = 6%
Wichita, KS =144 out of 3744 = 3.8%


Again, let me point out that this data is probably not the full picture so it may not be a real reflection of the amount of foreclosures in a specific city. I'm not sure of the accuracy of the numbers at Zillow so take this with a grain of salt.

It is pretty clear that some cities have a lot of foreclosures and some cities do not. Madison Wisconsin only has a few foreclosures on the market and Las Vegas has a lot.

Realtytrack also tracks foreclosure rates. This article from last month has foreclosure rates per state and for certain cities.

Historic Unemployment data

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a wealth of information. One area of data that they track is the unemployment rate as well as other employment statistics.

Employment data is at their CPS page. If you go to the site you can see some current statistics summarized on the right column. The unemployment rate is 6.1% for Sept. 2008 and the number of unemployed rose 101,000 in the month.

If you scroll down the page you can get to CPS databases. Using that you can look up historic data. I did this for unemployment and employment figures and created the charts below.

First is the unemployment rate as a % for the past few decades:
I made this chart myself for data for 1976 to 2008. The BLS has figures going back to 1948.
If you do a search on BLS with the 'One Screen Data search' then you can have it plot the data as a graph. Using the graphing function on the BLS site for unemployment figures for 1948 to 2008 it produces the following graph:
They also give a table of the data. The average unemployment rate for 1948 to 2008 was 5.58%. Unemployment was over 6% in about 2/3 of the past 60 years.

The BLS also tracks figures for the # of employed people, the total population, and the number of people in the labor force. When figuring employment they only consider the population of people who are over 16 years of age and not in prison or the military. So the population number is mainly people over 16 years old. The Labor force is then the number of people who actually work or try to. The labor force is a combination of the employed and the unemployed. The unemployment rate is the % of people in the labor force who are unemployed at any given time. So the unemployment rate is only among those people who normally work and doesn't count people under 16 years old or who are not in the labor force. People not in the labor force would include people who are retired, in college or financially independent, etc.

Below is a chart of various employment related figures for the past few decades (the numbers are in 1000's): So for this you can see the overall trend for the labor force, employed people, unemployed people and those not in the labor force.

The number of people in the labor force versus those not in the labor force has changed over time. One interesting chart to look at is the % of population in the labor force over time. Using the graphing on the BLS site I got the following chart.

Percent of population in the labor force:
This is interesting since you can see that starting in the 1960's and increasing through the 1980's the % of the population that participated in the labor force grew steadily from roughly 58% in the 1950's to 66% level in the 1990's and beyond. I would assume that this is due to two major factors: first, more women working and second, more households needing two incomes to support themselves.