Now, I'm gonna show you how I manage my own credit score using a tool called ScoreMaster and how you can use it as well to simulate your credit score and see how many points you could add to your credit score. Especially if you're not ready to buy a house right now, and maybe you're looking at buying three months, six months, maybe even a year from now. It's really helpful to increase your credit score.
Because when your credit score does increase, your interest rate is going to be better when you do look at getting a home. Now, what's really cool about ScoreMaster is they did reach out to me and they're offering a 7-day trial.
So I wanna walk you through how to use ScoreMaster. So there's three main tools. We have ScoreTracker. So this is gonna show us obviously how our score changes over time, which is really important to see how does your payment history then impact. Is your score going up? Is it going down, is it staying the same?
Also ScoreBuilder. So what we can do is take action here with the creditor to change possibly the points on our credit score and then ScoreBoost so we can see any payments that we can make or spending and how that affects our credit score. You can also see the simulated amount of points that could be added to our credit score with these changes.
We also have a SmartCredit Report here shows us kind of like a grade school report. And we can take a look in below.
I like that you can see all of the inquiries, and public records as well.
What's really nice about ScoreMaster is they do offer a million dollars of identity fraud insurance. However, I'm still not wanting to just go give out my information. Please don't just go give out your information. Even if you have that insurance.
This is really important because people often are wondering how does the momentum of their credit score change. That's one of the most important things when buying your home. Because a mortgage lender is going to pull a slightly different credit score than is available to you, from any soft pull credit site because ScoreMaster is not going to impact your credit score. When you're looking at it, or taking any actions.
So what you wanna see then with your spending habits, is the momentum of your credit score. Is it increasing or is it decreasing depending on your different spending habits or new accounts that you open payment history, things like that. So it's really nice to be able to see what's the momentum. Obviously we want our credit score to be going up, and if it's already high, we want it to stay high.
So next, what we wanna do is take a look at what ways could we actually build onto the score. When you click take action now. In the ScoreBuilder, it kind of guides us through a game plan to get to better credit.
When you click continue, it will show us our starting score along with what our goal score could be by taking action on some of the negative accounts that we may have.
We again can click Review Current and this walks us through a general info about how credit works, how that score is put together, and then also what's helping your score.
What are the accounts in here that are actually keeping your score high or keeping it where it's at so we can see everything that we've done.
We can also see what's actually hurting our score and its impact that it has on our credit score and you can also see some late history which are all having an impact on the credit score.
However, it is low and we can explore if there's options that we could take or actions that we could take to reduce the impacts on our credit report. So we can click, Let's keep going.
This then shows us the different actions that we could take. Things like fixing credit, reporting errors, getting a goodwill correction. Paying off for negotiating debts and then removing identity theft, if any of these apply. If none these apply, then these aren't actions that we're gonna take. But if they do apply, we can take the action right in here without actually having to directly negotiate or talk with a creditor. So what we can do is click, Let's Take Action.
So for instance, let's say on this Citibank account, it's gonna show. Here are the problem accounts. We can kind of scroll through these different cards here and let's take a look at this one first. So when we look at the history, we can then start to say, is there something that we could do with this account?
In this instance, let's say that there was an error. Let's say that this was an error here in the reporting of our history. We can either explore more about this, watch a video or fix the error.
So we can say maybe, I was never late on this account. You can explain more in detail here, click Next.
Then confirm mail delivery.
Just a quick reminder, read through the Correct a Credit Reporting Inaccuracy really quickly and then it will mail out to the creditor with that dispute here.
So in ScoreBoost, what I really like about this is, this is very similar to a simulator that loan officers have access to, to be able to see if you took a certain amount of money to pay down your debts, how much could that change your credit score. So for instance, what you do with a slider is put in how much you'd be comfortable spending to impact your credit score.
So for instance, let's say that we had $2,000 extra that we were like, Okay, we want to pay down some debts to boost our credit score. So $2,000 here would add 15 points estimated to our credit score going from where we were at, which was a 639 up to a 654.
So you can use this when you're starting to look at different loans. The minimum for a conventional loan is 620, it's really good with a conventional loan to have a 680 and higher. So I can actually explore, looking at, to get to a 680 range, I would need 41 points, and I need to pay about $5,700 on my debts.
So now that we see we can pay $5,700, pay down our debts, $5,700 to get us to a 680, it's now going to show us the points that it could add to our credit score and how much time with how much money, and when we need to pay that on.
So for instance, the Capital One account that we have in this test scenario could add 35 points to our credit score in four days if we pay $4,800. We need to pay that by the 11th. And if that doesn't work, by the time the 11th rolls out, it will come up with a new game plan for you as well.
We can see this with all of the other accounts as well. And then what accounts don't meet that criteria? Now, the opposite is true. If you're in that spot where you're like, Man, I'm actually needing to increase my debt a little bit. Maybe I need to put something on a credit card. How much is that gonna impact me? So I can see, let's say, I needed to spend. Let's say $2,000. If I put that onto my cards, that could reduce my credit score by 20 points.
So that's something really big that we need to keep in mind. This tool is extremely helpful if you're in that spot where you're saying, I really need a little bit more to my credit score so that you can qualify it for a loan at a better interest rate or better terms, or just qualify easier.
We have the ScoreTracker to see the momentum of our score, the ScoreBuilder to see what actions we can take with any inaccurate, or unfavorable remarks in our credit report. Also, the ScoreBoost to see any payments or spending and how that affects your credit score.
We also have the credit report, SmartCredit report so you get unlimited of these. You get one credit report that shows all three bureaus once a month. So Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. There's also a money manager I won't get into here and the fraud insurance as well. So this is what I use to manage my credit score.
I also get alerts through ScoreMaster to see if there's any inquiries or anything that I need to take action on with my credit report. Again, you can try ScoreMaster's 7-day trial.
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