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🧠Goat Quote

🪙Two Cents

Credit Utilization Rate is one of the most important factors for keeping a high credit score and in turn helping your likelihood for being approved for future loans and credit applications. The credit utilization is how much of your ‘available’ credit is used at any given point.

For example, if you have a credit card with a $5,000 limit and you owe $1,000 on it, your credit utilization rate is 20%.

Credit bureaus like to see a utilization rate of 30% or less. If you consistently use more than 30% of your available credit, it could negatively impact your credit score. In fact, I would even urge you to keep your utilization ratio in the single digits (below 10%).

There are 3 ways you can do this:

1. You can call your bank and increase your credit limit. I’ve done this a few times just to keep my utilization rate as low as possible. Note: this does not mean you should be spending more. Remember, our goal is to keep the utilization rate as low as possible.

2. You can make the credit card payment before the bill is due. Paying down the balance early eliminates that balance to be reported to credit bureau.

   Pro tip: Go to your credit card account and you’ll notice there’s a field called ‘Next closing date’. If you pay off even a part of your bills before this date, it sends a positive signal to the credit bureaus and improves your score!

3. Keep your spending low, low, low, low 🙂 

❗Lessons Learned

Earlier this year, I read a book called ‘Reconciliation: The Healing of the Inner Child’ by Thich Nhat Khan.

In the book, the Buddhist monk speaks about how each of us needs a certain amount of suffering in order to grow up, to understand, and to cultivate our compassion, joy, and happiness.

This is a beautiful reminder to remind ourselves that with all of our sufferings come opportunity. If we haven’t suffered then there’s no way we can learn. In fact, us humans have a tendency to run away from suffering. We think that by seeking pleasure we’ll avoid suffering. But this doesn’t work. In fact, it stunts our growth and our happiness.

So the next time you’re stuck between a tough decision and an easy one, try picking the hard one and see what you can learn from it.

📝Featured Blog Article

While social media aims to reduce boundaries and bring people closer together, I'm afraid it's actually doing the opposite.

→ How many times have you gone to lunch with a friend and they're on their phone?

→ How many times are you standing in line at a coffee shop and you see people head down scrolling endlessly? Oh you haven't heard? Making conversation with people and taking time to enjoy the scenery is so 90s. I've seen this happen with my own friends. 

Instead of leveraging social media to create more real connections, it's seemed to replace in-person friends completely. It's become a substitute for living your real life.

⭐Rad Recs

One book that changed my life is this: Reconciliation, healing the inner child. One of my dear friends told me about this book a while ago and while at first I was afraid to pick it up, it slowly drew me in. I will admit it here first, I cried when I read the first few chapters. As adults, little do we realize how much suffering we’ve experienced in our lives. The notion of having and actively working on healing my inner child was a blessing to me. This book is so near and dear to me that if for some reason you are not able to afford this book, I am willing to go out of my way and ship it to your home. It’s important each of you read this.

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