Photo Credits: rachaelhubbard

With the collapse of our financial institutions and the wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies sweeping the nation, it’s no surprise that employers are turning to the credit report as a tool to measure an applicant’s character.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act allows employers to have access to your credit information. While they still need your written permission to run your credit report, not granting it may give them the impression that you have something to hide.

My friend Hajj Flemings is one of the few personal branding experts who regularly talks about the importance of a good credit history for personal branding (he calls the credit report a “character report”), going as far as dedicating one chapter of his book The Brand YU Life to the subject of financial integrity.

The point is this: just as once-powerful brands like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch are now worthless due to financial mismanagement, our personal brand can be negatively affected by poor personal finance habits. Fortunately, there are a few things that we can all do to improve our financial position in any economic environment:

• Go to annualcreditreport.com and request a copy of your credit report from each of the three major consumer reporting companies (you are entitled to a free copy every year). If you see errors, dispute them in writing . The reporting companies are required to investigate and correct any mistake within 30 days.
• Live within your means. If you don’t have the money don’t buy it (except for big ticket items like a car or a house).
• Keep a budget and stick to it. Study your budget and make small cuts every month, starting with the items you don’t need or use.
• Put every bill on automatic payment, to make sure you pay them on time.
• Use credit cards to build credit, not to buy stuff you can’t afford. Pay your balance in full every month.

You can also read this simple personal finance guide I put together a few months ago. It is short and easy to read, and will give you some guidelines on how to set up your financial accounts and develop good money habits:

I also highly recommend Ramit Sethi’s blog, and his new book I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Don’t get turned off by the tongue-in-cheek title: Ramit is one of the most knowledgeable and entertaining personal finance experts (until I discovered his blog, I didn’t know that reading about personal finance could be fun).

I’ve been relatively quiet on the blog posting front for a few days now, so I want to share with you this Powerpoint presentation that I put together for a series of talks I plan to give in Miami in the next few weeks.

While presentations are meant to be delivered, and the slides by themselves don’t tell the whole story, I wanted to show it to you regardless, since I believe that in this case the main ideas will come through clearly enough.

The main audience is made of job hunters who are not really familiar with the web and social networks, and the objective of the presentation is to give them enough information and motivation in one hour so that they start experimenting with web tools for networking and personal branding.

Let me know what you think.

I was recently interviewed by Chris Lunt, founder of Nombray, and the interview is now up on his blog. We talk about blogging, social media and building your brand. Nombray is an interesting new service that allows you to register your domain name and set up a simple website consolidating all your social media profiles, which you can access through tabs at the top of the page. It is a simple, yet effective way to start building your web identity if you still don’t have a personal website or blog.