What is a Credit Rating

A credit rating is used by banks and lending companies to make decisions on your loan or credit applications. It determines whether a person is reliable enough to be given a money credit. With a not so good credit rating, you may get rejected for a loan or if you are lucky will be given a fraction of the amount that you are asking, for a higher interest rate and a shorter payment period.

NOTE: This is not the amount of purchases that you did with your credit card or the points that you accumulate with a credit card.


A credit rating depends on a lot of factors. One of which is your reputation as a borrower. Lenders also ask the following questions:

• Are you always late in your payments for your credit card?
• Are you always knee deep in debt because you cannot seem to get around to paying each one?
• Do you have maxed out credit cards?
• Have you had any other credit or loan that you have paid for or are still paying?
• How many are they?
• Have you had any problems paying for your loans?

Other considerations that make up your credit score is income that you are receiving currently. People who have high income are generally perceived as someone who can handle a loan. Another factor besides the ability to pay factor is the amount of debt that you have. If the bank feels that it is too much debt for one person, they can easily reject your application.

Here's some tips to improving your credit rating

learn to spend cash only on the essentials. This means food. Surely you can do without a new pair of shoes, clothes or jewelry for the time being. 

If you have a few credit cards, pay off the credit card that has the highest interest rate first then work on the rest. The objective here is to be debt free. When that happens, you can cancel some of them and keep two or three and to maintain your credit rating, make sure you only use up 25% or less of the maximum limit.

For those who make a lot of long distance calls, now is the time to reduce them.

If you have a few accounts that you don’t really need, close them.

Energy conservation (turning off the lights etc) will also save money when times are tight.

For business, ensuring you keep up to date with the latest law changes and insurance can help as well.

Developing Workplace Health and Safety Procedures for your business can be a huge task.
Other than the obvious – ensuring that your people get home safely each day without injury, the Government has placed sizeable penalties and dishes out some pretty decent sized fines for non compliance, especially if there is an injury in the workplace. Clearly, it's not worth the risk. The challenge however, is in not spending all your weekends and nights trying to write safety procedures yourself, or at the other end of the spectrum - paying through the nose for a decent safety package. It's the balance of getting a high quality service for a reasonable rate.

If you're looking for a completely comprehensive WHS/OHS Package - Visit the BlueSafe Australia site.

The Post Tortoise

A commentary on the current Australian political scene perhaps?

An elderly farmer was in the Emergency Ward having stitches put in his hand, due to an accident with a piece of machinery. 

The doctor carrying out the procedure struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Politicians and their role as our leaders.

The old farmer said, "Well, you know, most Politicians are 'Post Tortoises'.''

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him, what a 'Post
Tortoise' was?

The old farmer said, "When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a tortoise balanced on top, that's a post tortoise."

The old farmer, seeing the puzzled look on the doctor's face,
continued to explain. 

"You know he didn't get up there by himself, he doesn't belong up there, he doesn't know what to do while he's up there, he's elevated beyond his ability to function, and you just wonder what kind of dumb jackass put him up there to begin with."

 “Life's Tragedy is that we get old to soon and wise too late.”

 - Benjamin Franklin