Lynette Khalfani-Cox

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97 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2023 last heard Mar 2023

Lynette Khalfani-Cox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Buying a Home? Here’s What to Do Before Starting Your Search · 31 Mar 2023 podcast

You have to go through a third party to do it.

But many consumers will find that they get a 30, 50, 70 point jump or more in their FICO credit score just from adding this alternative credit data to their credit files, the credit files that are maintained by the big three, by Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.

So adding your rental payment history is one way to boost your credit score.

You can do it with other things too, like utility payments and so forth.

Second, you should obviously make sure you focus on paying all your bills on time every single month without fail.

The number one factor in your FICO credit score, 35% of it, is based on how well you pay your bills on time.

And so you never wanna have any 30-day late payments on your credit reports because a single missed payment can drop your FICO credit score by 50 to 100 points.

So you absolutely never want to miss any payments.

And then third, I would say lower your credit card balances.

So 30% of your FICO credit score is based on the amount of debt that you have outstanding, specifically that credit card debt that a lot of folks are carrying.

So when you lower your credit card balances, that tends to boost your FICO credit score.

Absolutely.

I mean, think about folks who might be at the margins.

If you were at a 700 and you had a late payment, for example, and you got dropped down to the

620, 630, 40 category, now all of a sudden you're in a different credit tier and a lender is not going to give you good interest rates.

So you really do want to make sure you're paying those obligations on time.

Even being though at a, say a 720, if you have good credit,

and you're able to boost your credit score further, maybe by 40 points or so, by adding rent payment or other alternative credit data to your credit report, that might put you in the very best of tiers to get the optimal interest rates that are available to consumers in the marketplace.

So by all means, do everything in your power to boost those credit scores.

I would add also, JR, that there's one other technique that helps in fairly short order to boost one's FICO credit score, and that's a technique called piggybacking.

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