Consumer knowledge about credit scores has improved significantly over the past year, including awareness of who collects information on which most scores are based, the importance of checking this information, what good scores are, how to raise them, and what service providers use these scores, according to a survey in April.

But that’s about where it stops.

Most consumers still do not know how costly low scores can be, when multiple inquiries hurt their scores, and the risks of purchasing credit repair services, according to findings of the second annual consumer knowledge about credit scores paid for by the Consumer Federation of America and VantageScore Solutions.

“In the numerous consumer knowledge surveys we have undertaken over the past several decades, I have never seen such improvement from one year to the next,” says Stephen Brobeck, CFA’s executive director. “However, credit reports and scores are so important to consumers that they should try to improve knowledge that remains deficient in several key areas.”

Methodology notes

The CFA-VantageScore survey was administered to a representative sample of over 1,000 adult Americans by phone in late April 2012 by ORC International. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points. A CFA-VantageScore survey containing many of the same questions was administered by ORC International in January 2011.

Several housing experts are predicting that this year will be the last chance for homebuyers to cash in on the weak housing market.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Buying a home may never get any cheaper than this. Several housing experts are predicting that this year will be the last chance for bargain hunters to cash in on the best deals of the weak housing market.

With home prices down 34% nationally since 2006 and mortgage rates at historic lows, homes have never been more affordable — but it won’t stay this way for much longer.

Stuart Hoffman, chief economist for PNC Financial Services (PNC, Fortune 500), said he expects home prices to flatten out by the third quarter and start climbing by next year.

A number of factors will help bolster the housing market, he said, including a decline in the number of foreclosures and continued job growth. In addition, homebuyers will have better access to mortgages as they get their finances in order and improve their credit scores.

Some economists, like Trulia’s Jed Kolko, expect home prices to pick up even more quickly. Trulia’s data shows that the national average for asking prices already increased 1.4% in the first quarter of 2012, compared with the last three months of 2011.

“This is a strong indicator that we will start seeing home price indexes, like the S&P/Case-Shiller, start to report home price increases this summer,” he said.

Prospective homebuyers who’ve been sitting on the fence shouldn’t worry if they aren’t quite ready to make the leap. Analysts are predicting that the initial price gains will be modest, at least, in most markets.

Hoffman, for example, is forecasting a 2% increase in 2013 compared with 2012. Meanwhile David Stiff, chief economist for Fiserv, predicts that prices will turn in the last quarter of 2012 and will rise 4.2% for the 12 months through September 2013.

Foreclosures start to fade. One major factor that will drive the trend is the cooling of the foreclosure crisis. Stan Humphries, chief economist for Zillow, said that the percentage of mortgage loans 90 days or more late, a good predictor of future foreclosures, is “falling fast.”

That percentage dropped 15% year-over-year to 3.1% through the end of 2011, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. And the decline is accelerating: More than 70% of the decline came in the last three months of the year.

Before things slow down, however, buyers should brace themselves for a temporary spike in the number of foreclosures as banks start expediting the processing of hundreds of thousands foreclosures that were stuck in the system following the robo-signing scandal. That backlog should move more quickly now that new guidelines for processing foreclosures have been outlined in the $26 billion foreclosure settlement.

Many of the bank-owned properties currently coming out of the foreclosure pipeline are being snapped up by investors who are fixing them up and renting them out — often to those who were displaced by the foreclosure of their own home. That has helped to lift prices on foreclosed properties, according to Alex Villacorte, the director of analytics for Clear Capital, which specializes in housing market valuations.

“That could have a significant impact on the market overall in terms of providing a rising floor to home values,” he said.

In some markets hit hard by foreclosures, the turnaround in prices is already underway. Phoenix recorded an 8.4% jump in home prices during the three months ended April 30, compared with the three months ended January 31, according to Clear Capital.

“It’s crazy,” said Tanya Marchiol, founder of Team Investments, a Phoenix real estate investing firm. “Stuff I was selling six months ago for $60,000 to $80,000 is now $90,000 to $110,000.”

Miami saw a 4.6% increase quarter-over-quarter through April, and Tampa, Fla., was up 4.4%, according to Clear Capital.

Goodbye 3.8% mortgage. In addition to home prices, mortgages could also move higher.

Mortgage rates have been at or near historic lows for much of the past six months. The average interest rate for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage has not topped 4.5% since July 2011 and this week, it hit 3.84%, a new low.

But rates aren’t expected to remain at these record-low levels much longer. As the economy continues to recover, rates will move higher, said Doug Lebda, CEO of LendingTree, the online lending site. Although, he said, they will “stay very reasonable.”

The Mortgage Bankers Association is forecasting that the 30-year fixed will hit 4.5% by the end of the year.

Greater demand for loans will help fuel the increase, according to Lebda.

Even though mortgage rates have been cheap, borrowing for home purchases has been sluggish. The Mortgage Bankers Association estimates that homebuyers will take out mortgage loans totaling about $415 billion this year, an increase of less than 3% compared with 2011. Next year, however, it forecasts that amount will almost double to $706 billion.

As housing markets stabilize and prices stop falling, homebuyers will be even more confident about buying, said Humphries.

“People can now see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “And that can be enough to get them off the fence.”

By Pamela Yip

For Angela Beasley of Miami, tax time seemed especially promising this year. After doing her taxes with Intuit’s popular TurboTax software, she found she was due a refund of nearly $5,000.

Anxious to get the money as quickly as possible, she paid the extra fee to file her return electronically. Then, she clicked “send.” After a delay, she said, an unusual message popped up on her screen:

“Your transmission didn’t go through,” it said. “A tax return with the same Social Security number has already been submitted — in other words, it appears you’re trying to e-file the same return twice.”

She says she was not quite sure what had happened until she went to work the next day and learned that many of her co-workers had had the same experience.

Beasley and her colleagues are among the nearly half-million taxpayers since 2008 who have been victims of identity theft.

“It feels like you have no control over what can happen with your finances or your personal information. Like you have no control over anything and that anything can happen to you,” Beasley said.

With most returns now filed electronically, all it takes is a Social Security number to file a return and claim a refund. And since many companies that provide electronic filing services offer instant refunds in the form of debit cards, fraudsters can be spending the money within days.

The IRS puts identity theft at the top of its “Dirty Dozen Tax Scams” for 2012. As of January, the agency had active identity theft cases in 22 states, and said its fraud filters caught 262,000 fake returns in 2011 compared with just 49,000 in 2010. But authorities know it is just the tip of the iceberg.

In Tampa, Fla., one of the earliest places where the fraud showed up, authorities say drug dealers and other hardened criminals have turned to tax identity theft instead because it is so easy, is far less risky, and, they apparently think, victimless.

“I’ve never seen individuals involved in a specific type of a crime that so readily admit what they’re doing. They don’t see anything wrong with it. Taking the government’s money is not wrong in their eyes,” said Tampa Police Chief Jane Castor, whose department has made several big arrests, including a sweep last fall dubbed “Operation Rainmaker,” in cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service and Postal Inspectors.

The operation netted 49 arrests, and authorities say it intercepted $100 million in proceeds from the fraud. But Castor says since then, the fraud has only grown.

“We thought that Operation Rainmaker may have slowed this down somewhat, but all indications are it is worse this year, 2012, than it was last year,” Castor said.

Nationwide figures appear to bear that out. The Federal Trade Commission, which is the main U.S. agency monitoring identity theft, says complaints in the category that includes tax refunds have doubled in the past two years.

On this tax day in New York, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced the indictment of a dozen defendants who allegedly set up a fake job placement web site in order to get Social Security numbers and other identifying information from some 300 victims. They are accused of using that information to obtain more than $450,000 in refunds from the IRS.

By targeting the unemployed, authorities allege, the defendants were able to garner a pool of individuals less likely to have earned income to report to the IRS. That way, returns filed in their names were less likely to raise suspicion.

Elsewhere, authorities have found “cheat sheets” in jails, where criminals share information about where to get Social Security numbers and how to best pull off the fraud.

For victims like Angela Beasley, finding out that her electronic tax form would not go through has been only the beginning of a long and frustrating ordeal.

She says she started with the IRS, which told her to file a return by mail, along with Form 14039, an identity theft affidavit. Then, she says, she was told to call the police.

“I called my local police office, they directed me to call another local police office. I called them and they said, ‘No we don’t take those reports, we don’t report that particular identity theft because it’s so rampant and it’s happened to so many people,’ that they’re overwhelmed and they can’t even deal with it, just call the IRS. But the IRS then asks you if you have a police report,” Beasley said.

Beasley says she has been told it can take anywhere from six months to two years to get her refund back. But that is just the first of her concerns.

“If I made $50,000 and this person has submitted a record to the IRS that I’m making $75,000 a year and threw me into another tax bracket … if I was applying for a student loan or maybe discounted health care this could probably affect me,” she said.

Beasley has channeled her frustration into a blog, “Hacked by TurboTax,” though she acknowledges TurboTax is not to blame for her situation — something a TurboTax spokeswoman is quick to point out as well.

“The blog title is clearly misleading,” Colleen Gatlin wrote in an e-mail to CNBC. “TurboTax has not been hacked nor have identities been stolen from TurboTax at any time.”

Nonetheless, she said, the company is working closely with the IRS to detect and prevent fraud in the face of a “marked increase” in the activity this year.

Castor says it is up to the IRS to tighten its systems. “We can’t investigate our way out of this,” the Tampa Police Chief said.

The IRS says it is working on it. “The IRS takes this issue very seriously and we continue to expand on our screening process in order to stop fraudulent returns and protect innocent taxpayers,” the agency said in a statement.

The agency says it stopped $1.4 billion in refunds from being sent to identity thieves last year, and it is working to speed up the process of resolving cases, a situation complicated by strict privacy laws surrounding tax returns.

The main federal agency dealing with identity theft is the Federal Trade Commission. But by law, the IRS is prohibited from sharing information about individual tax returns — fraudulent or not — with the FTC.

Legislation pending in Congress would toughen penalties for tax return identity theft and broaden the definition of victims, but protect your online identities. Guard your Social Security number, and beware of so-called “phishing” scams, where criminals attempt to access your personal information through official-looking e-mails.

The IRS has posted a list of tips here.

Tell us your story! E-mail us: investigationsinc@cnbc.com

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Why you may ask? Instead of using your FICO score, insurers examine what’s referred to as an “insurance score” to determine whether or not you’ll be a potential risk for filing claims – a lower credit score, according to some experts in the industry, means that a customer with a low credit score will be a higher risk than those with higher digits. Ultimately, cheaper car insurance premiums do depend on your current credit score.

Affordable Car Insurance and Good Credit Scores
The recent statistics from a study conducted by CarInsurance.com are promising for individuals with credit scores of 750 save on average $783 each year on lower car insurance. The 40% of customers with a credit score over 750 can expect to save almost $23,000 on cheaper auto insurance costs over the span of an adult lifetime.

For teen drivers between the ages of 16-24, credit scores aren’t really significant in factoring cheaper auto insurance because the majority of teens don’t yet have established credit; however consider the following statistics for teens with established credit:

• Credit scores above 750 pay an average of $2,515/yr
• Credit scores between 650-749 pay an average of $2,387/yr
• Credit scores between 500-649 pay an average of $2,692/yr
• No credit pay an average of $4,191

Young adults between the ages of 25-34 with credit scores over 750 and a clean driving record qualify for lower vehicle insurance and pay an average of $1,155 annually, compared to $1,938 to the same population with credit scores below the magical 750. Other statistics revealed the average driver between the ages of 25-34 with:

• Credit scores between 650-749 pay an average of $1,658/yr
• Credit scores between 500-649 pay an average of $2,023/yr
• No credit pays an average of $2,182/yr.

Ways to Boost Your Credit Score to Become Eligible for Cheaper Car Insurance
Even if your current credit score is less than perfect, there are ways to improve your credit to take advantage of lower vehicle insurance premiums.

• Routinely check your credit score from the 3 major credit reporting agencies
• Immediately report any errors.
• Always make payments on time.
• Never allow coverage to lapse.
• Establish credit in your name.
• Don’t hesitate to compare insurance quotes; doing so doesn’t affect your insurance score.

Remember that maintaining a good driving record as well as a credit score of 750 or above are the most effective ways to enjoy the benefits of lower auto insurance! While it may take some effort on your part to be responsible, consider cheaper car insurance premiums a well-worth investment into your future!

Related Links to Cheap Car Insurance

http://cheapercarinsurance.com/
http://www.safeauto.com/