Cassie Price is a Credit Strategist and Credit Repair Expert at Wealth Generation Collective who offers the Credit Score Builders Lab Course. She can help you repair your credit and understand credit numbers like never before.
Are you looking to thrive with your finances, credit and overall lifestyle design? There is something powerful about having money and credit available to you. The reality is pulling, looking at and dealing with credit scores can be daunting for most people.
Cassie helps people realize and use tools that ultimately give them more money.
CREDIT SCORES
Let’s start with the basics. Credit scores.
A credit score is really an algorithm based on financial risk. It is common knowledge is there are 3 credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax and Transunion but most people don’t know about having multiple credit scores. You have an auto score, mortgage score, credit card score and they are different for every bureau. There are also are free scores from NerdWallet, Credit Karma and companies such as this. Their scores can be very different from the FICA scores. Your job is to manipulate each one to get to get the highest credit score. Over a 700, this is a perfect score and you get top tier financing.
Creditors not only do they look at the number but they look at your financial habits. These habits show how you are being and how you walk into a financial matter. So how do you work all this in your favor?
FIXING YOUR CREDIT
Sometimes, making a little tweak your credit a little might mean you save $20-$100/month.
The part of the credit score you have the most control over is credit utilization. This is the percentage of your total credit available you are utilizing at that particular time. This factors in at 30% of your credit score. For example, if you have $10,000 total credit and you have $1,000 credit you have a 10% utilization. This is where you have some control, if you max out all your credit cards in one month, your credit would lower 100 points and if you pay off all your cards in another month, it would raise 100 points.
Let’s go say you are going to get a car, you want your balances to be really low for a few months prior to a major purchase. You get better items and premium financing.
I WISH MY CREDIT SCORE WERE BETTER
For most people credit scores bring an intense source of shame, no matter what their number is.
Sometimes a lower credit score is a matter of not having the credit history to change your number. For example, Cassie has a client that was in the 750 credit score range but wanted to be near 800. After a simple recommendation to call her credit card company and ask for an increase in her credit limit, this adjusted her utilization ratios and now her score is almost 800.
So what if your score is not as high as this? Pulling your credit score can be daunting for most people. This is about looking wh