October 16 is Get Smart About Credit Day—a perfect time to learn how credit works and why it matters for your financial well-being. Here’s what goes into your score, why it’s important, and how you can build healthy credit. While the exact formulas are unknown, credit scoring models like FICO and VantageScore generally focus on five main areas: payment history, amounts owed, length of credit history, credit mix, and new credit.

Presenting a vision of what the future might look like has been an obsession for creative minds in science, literature, and popular culture for centuries. In recent years, an endless string of movies has been produced by Hollywood depicting various forms of the apocalypse, whether in the form of a natural disaster, an alien invasion, worldwide epidemic, or just about anything else you can imagine. My personal favorite is the classic “The Terminator”. In the highly unlikely event you haven’t seen it, the plot centers on the premise that an artificial intelligence (AI) system named Skynet becomes “self-aware” and on its own initiates a nuclear holocaust.

A Home Equity Line of Credit, or HELOC, lets you borrow money using the equity in your home as collateral. Unlike a traditional loan with a lump sum, a HELOC works like a credit card: you’re approved for a set limit, and you can draw funds as needed during a “draw period,” such as 10 years. During this time, you often only pay the interest.