Your Score: An Insider’s Secrets to Understanding, Controlling, and Protecting Your Credit Score

Former mortgage lender Davenport offers a handy, one-stop guide to understanding—and fixing—your credit score. Outraged at practices he found predatory and nontransparent, Davenport left the industry to instead provide credit-management services. He brings both sides of his expertise to answering common credit-related questions. Credit is undeniably big business, and in Davenport’s eyes, it’s also a creepy one, wherein credit bureaus and consumers have an inherently adversarial and imbalanced relationship; credit bureaus, he posits, want customers to think their scores are complicated, but anyone can learn how they work. His offering is a step-by-step manual to understanding your “real” financial score, not the estimate provided by free annual reports. He guides readers through identifying and fixing common mistakes, making sense of the report itself, and building a strong credit profile. Readers can skip to the sections pertaining most to their needs, such as discussions of home purchases, credit-card management, identity theft, establishing credit, school loans, and surviving disasters such as foreclosure and divorce. Davenport has written a clearheaded, must-read guide for anyone looking to decode the most influential number of them all. Agent: Farley Chase, Chase Literary Agency. (Jan. 2018)