I had a quick discussion with Jimena of ScoreMaster. ScoreMaster is a credit software that I've been using recently, and it's been really interesting to use.
Because in 2016, I had a late payment that got on my Amazon account, and I have no idea how it happened because I have all my stuff on autopay. That late payment has been sticking around and bringing down my score for a while, not a ton, but a good amount. And I'm applying for a mortgage recently. And so it's been annoying me a ton. So as I've been using the ScoreMaster more, I was able to go into the dashboard and really quickly realize I could take action on that late payment.
So I did that a couple of weeks ago, and the other day I got a letter from one of the credit bureaus. It was like, we're going to take care of this. And the late payment came off of my credit report. And so it's been really awesome to use and also use in a similar way that loan officers have access to credit simulators that help you see what action you need to take with your credit score. Because so much of it can be a mystery, do I need to pay down this card, or do I need to look at, what actions I can take on my, any errors or things like that. And it gives you a really solid plan on how to boost your credit score in the future.
According to Jimena, when you sign up with ScoreMaster, when you log in, you will see different parts of it. So the top part of the ScoreMaster website is going to be very self-explanatory. It will show you your credit score. As it's being reported by TransUnion. As it's being reported by TransUnion. That is the data feed that they use.
They also have calculated your Auto Score, Insurance Score and Hiring Risk Index grads are looking for a job and employment. She said that you can track your score over time as you start to use the platform and your score changes. Now, what I used is I took action on ScoreBuilder.
ScoreBuilder is one of the first features that we develop and we have patents on this. So if you ever see this anywhere, they aren't licensing that technology from them. They are the only ones that have it. So if you have any negative accounts on your credit report, this feature would be available. If you don't have any, then it's definitely you'd worry about, but if you do, it still walks you through a little bit of a tutorial to help you understand your credit report a little bit better.
Also, ScoreBuilder is going to show you the counts that are helping your score which is great. And then it's going to show you the ones that are hurting your score. Those are the ones you want to take action on, and this is where most other credit monitoring platforms or solutions are going to stop.
They're going to show you, okay. These are your problem accounts, but you still have to take action yourself. You still have to do the work. Mail the letters or call do whatever it is you got to do, but you have to do it yourself. It takes time. And it's a lot of times it takes money. If you don't, you hire someone to do it. But with ScoreMaster, you could just take care of it right away on their platform.
So for example, there is an initial problem account that has 30, 60, and 90 days late. You can say, you know what? That was identity theft. That was not me. So you can click on that. And they would mail that letter out for you to your creditor.
So one thing to note, this is going directly to who you have this account with, not the credit bureaus, the letters that we've said I was going to the bureaus. So for example, let's say I was not 90 days late. Let's say, Hey, you know what? I'm not late. There are some additional reasons. Or let's say that the reason's not in the dropdown menu, write my own, and then you would hit next. And then, it will say, confront instant delivery.
Now we are going to either fax a letter directly to who you have this account, or we're going to mail it. And what we do really depends on the creditors themselves. But the beauty about this is when you go directly to the source if they approve it, they, by law, they by law have 30 days to respond to you, first of all, second of all, they also have to notify the three bureaus.
So by taking care of it with one person took care of it everywhere. It saves you a lot of time.
So for someone like me who is very familiar with credit, I help coach people through the mortgage process with their credit. And it was always interesting, I think back now, like why didn't I solve that late payment earlier? And I think it was, it felt like a task to do. It's like, I don't really want to have to do this? Is it really that important to me? And I guess it still was, I was still annoyed by it, but then I was like, you know what, like seeing how easy it was to do this, I was like, this why I might as well just click and try it and see what happens. And it's amazing that got I'm still blown away. I thought it was, they were going to write back. You'd be like, no good luck. Try again. So I was amazed by how simple it was to do.
But also according to Jimena, it doesn't mean that if I had a great experience, we should not assume that every time or a hundred percent of the time they're going to say yes, they'll remove it. But there's a huge test success. There's no guarantee. But it is effective. It's the same as you mailing up the letter to yourself, what response you're going to get, it's just that this is that easier, more cost-effective way to do it.
Next is the ScoreBoost feature. Now again, Jimena said that they have patents on this one too. So you're not going to find a simulator like this anywhere else. So for example, we have this account that has $15,000 in credit card debt. Now, this person wants to pay that off completely. They would add some of the eight points to their credit score, but let's say, you got some credit card debt and you can't afford to pay it all off. You can go at your own pace. So you'd save your plan at the budget that you have.
So let's say I can pay $2,226. That's going to add points to my credit score and it tells me which credit cards to put it on. And then how much, depending on my balances and what's going to get me the fastest points. So for example you see on "My Payment Plant" the "To Get +6 pts Pay By", pay this amount by May 30th, there will be an update by June 3rd and to the account so we have you always pay a few days before that. So that it shows the lowest balance possible on your credit card based on what you can afford, which adds points to your score really fast.
The reason I was so excited about ScoreMaster is that I have not seen this available really anywhere else. I have not found anything that's like this, the only thing that's this is only available to loan officers to help simulate a credit score. And by doing similar things, no normal person can have access to that.
So it was really frustrating where it's how, because building credit or improving your credit score can be such a mystery where it's like, what do I do with what accounts, I see the general advice, but if I just want to boost my credit score in the next 60 days, what actions do I need to take now? And it's incredible that you can see which accounts are actually going to impact your score by how much during what period.
She said that, before she started working with ScoreMaster, she was one of those people. She had pretty good credit. She said, it was at a 740, but could not get beyond that.
According to her, she pays her credit cards off every month, all of it, but what she was doing is she was paying credit cards on the last day that she possibly could. On the due date. And so it kept her at a 740. Now, when she started following the plan, she has usually between the 790 and then 800, depending on, what that balance is.
Per Jimena, she buy one of the reports and so she didn't do anything different. She just pays things off on a different date. And now my score went up 50 points.
Likewise, if you are in a loan process and you are going to spend money, this also shows you what happens if you spend a lot of money and you don't pay it off in time and the cost you points, which can affect your ability to get a good interest rate. This is what a process that you're in.
I also asked her if they have data on what the average increase looks like with clients who go through like ScoreBoost or ScoreMaster? She said that usually, they're averaging about 60 points in about 20 days. That's also in their tagline because they took a data set of about 10,000 customers and this is the average that we've found.
She also said that there have been cases where somebody goes up like a hundred points in a week and but it's not gonna be for everybody. But it could be pretty radical. And another case is that if you really don't have a lot of credit card balances or a lot of credit cards, the point you'll get might be lower. So it just depends on the situation.
She also explained that a lot of services only show a one-credit score with a soft pull. So I asked her if she could explain a little bit more about what credit scores are being shown, how they're different from mortgage credit scores, and then the difference between that soft pull and a hard pull.
According to her, with your ScoreMaster account, you are going to get all three credit scores from Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. So the one that you see at the ScoreTracker is the data is being pulled from TransUnion. But when you scroll down to "3B Report & Scores", you can view all three, and this is one update every single month so that you can monitor all three scores every single month and make sure that everything looks up to date.
She said that with ScoreMaster, the inquiry is a soft pull. So that means that you can build your credit score and you can update it as many times as you want. You can view the figures as many times as you want. It's not gonna affect your score.
Regarding hard pull, she said, that's usually when you are going to go in for a loan of some sort, like a car or a mortgage going into what's called a hard pull, and that will usually cost you like two or three points on your credit. But with ScoreMaster, this is considered a soft pull. You can view it as many times.
Also, I asked if she could walk me through the difference between the scores in ScoreMaster and then what someone might see on the mortgage side. According to her, on the mortgage side, you're gonna want a FICO score and ScoreMaster is a vantage score.
So at the end of the day, she said, that the work on your credit is the work on your credit. So you can use a tool like ScoreMaster to pay off your cards on the right dates, to communicate directly with your creditors, and all that and all those things.
She also said that, once we followed all your custom plans and we've gotten all our points at that point, we would then go to the FICO website, pull the score and see what a mortgage lender is going to see. She also reminded me that the work is the work and that's something you could use our tool for.
I think that's a big thing that people run into as they see the soft pull score and it can be it's different than the mortgage score because the mortgage score only comes from a hard inquiry being pulled which is frustrating. And I wish it wasn't like that. Unfortunately, we can't really change the system.
But like what Jimena mentioned, doing the work is still doing the work on all scoring models. And what I like about the soft pulling models is since we can see the update, I really like them for tracking the momentum of the score. So usually, what happens is if the vantage score goes up. Most of the time the mortgage FICO score goes up and the opposite is true. So it's really nice to be able to track how is my credit score moving in what direction to then help me see what could be happening on the FICO side.
Also, she introduced me to Smart Report. According to her, it is used to view your credit report. It looks a little bit easier and it's really nicely laid out with all your negatives. You can take actions from there as well, or if you want to see all your different accounts, some ways that you want to look at through closed accounts or something like that, that's up to you.
She also mentioned that you could see all three side by side. So it makes it really easy for you to see do all of them match, they're not matched, which ones are off and then you know what you do.
I've been seriously impressed with this because getting credit, and repair credit coaching is really so expensive, especially when that money can be used to help boost your credit score, especially if you're close to buying a home soon.
Now finally according to her, if someone's looking to look at what they could boost their credit score by in the next 20 days, the best next step for them to take is, to enroll and use my link: ScoreMaster - Kyle so they can give you a discount. If you go directly to the site, it's a little bit more expensive. So use the link to sign up and then use the ScoreBoost feature as quickly as possible.
Jimena also stated that it's important to go in and take your actions if you have ScoreBuilder available because those do take a little bit longer. You're dealing with another company they've got 30 days to respond and Score Booster is going to be your fastest way to getting your credit score higher.
She also reminded us that we also need to make sure that when we log in we activate your million dollars of fraud insurance. Fraud is rampant nowadays. They know this and the level of coverage that they provide. They will protect you and your entire household to get this level of coverage through other companies. You're going to be actually paying a lot more about five to $10 more per month than what they charged. So you're definitely getting a good deal there.
Ask us a question →
