The week's best financial advice

Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial advice, gathered from around the web:

A new kind of credit score

What Kleenex is to facial tissues, FICO is to credit scores — "practically synonymous," said Maryalene LaPonsie at US News. But a new credit score company is "chipping away" at the Fair Isaac Corp.'s dominance in the credit business. The scores compiled by VantageScore Solutions, founded in 2006 with the backing of the three major credit bureaus, were used more than 6 billion times in 2015, double the amount used the year before. Like FICO, VantageScore determines how likely someone is to repay a debt, but it uses a simplified scoring system. While FICO uses more than 50 different models to provide separate scores for everything from auto loans to home mortgages, VantageScore has only three. The model can also score consumers who have as little as one month of credit history, compared with six months for FICO scores.

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Airfare relief, but barely

Airfares are indeed getting cheaper, but don't get too excited, said Martha C. White at Time​. Average fare prices fell about 6 percent in the third quarter of last year from the same period in 2014, according to the Department of Transportation — from $396 to $372. But that $24 savings looks less than impressive considering that airfares also hit their highest point in more than a decade during the third quarter of 2014. Nor does it make up for the growing number of fees for checked bags, snacks, and Wi-Fi that airlines are imposing. "Then there's the small fact that energy prices are hanging around levels nobody's seen in more than a decade." Given how far jet fuel prices have fallen, "flights could be way cheaper."

Good health has a price

Ironically, it's healthier people who need to save the most for health care in retirement, said Anne Tergesen at The Wall Street Journal. That counterintuitive finding comes from new research by the Empower Institute, which is backed by financial services firm Great-West Financial. Healthier people simply live longer, and thus need more savings to last their lifetime. Empower found that a 65-year-old man with type 2 diabetes should have about $88,300 saved, for example, to have a 90 percent chance of having enough money to cover lifetime medical expenses. That's compared with $114,900 for a 65-year-old male smoker, and $143,800 for a 65-year-old in good health. A healthy woman of the same age should have put away about $156,000, because women live longer on average.