Paying Your Cellphone Bill Can Boost Your Credit Score
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What headline news opens this Money Briefing about holiday spending and sales?
With your money briefing, I'm J.R. Whalen at the Wall Street Journal in New York. Did you know that paying your cell phone and utility bills has no impact on your credit rating? Well, that's about to change. We'll have details in a moment. First, these money and market stories you should know. The National Retail Federation says consumers are expected to spend, on average, $1,007 this holiday season. That's a nearly 5% increase over last year. And if you're a merchant who wants some of that cash, you better have some stuff on sale. The NRF says that three in four people believe discounts are very important or extremely important to making a purchase. And in a recent survey, the Rewards and Loyalty Program website Swagbucks says about a quarter of consumers say that 25% is the minimum discount they would consider to be a good sale.
Also, about 15% of people said that items reduced by 30% or 40% It's the minimum they'd expect, and 14% of shoppers said they wouldn't get out of bed for a discount of less than 20%. And while you're shopping online this holiday season, you might be drawn to items at the top of the list of seemingly hundreds of items and search results on Amazon. Well, it turns out many people have simply decided to buy one of those best-selling items appearing at the very top of the search list. Check out the Wall Street Journal report on how in China and elsewhere, some Amazon sellers resort to shrewd techniques to manipulate product listings and get one of those top spots and boost their sales. Amazon says it has zero tolerance for abuse of its systems and that it takes swift action against bad actors, but it keeps happening.
See the full story on WSJ.com or the WSJ app.
How do shoppers’ discount expectations and Amazon search tactics affect holiday purchases?
All those nickel and dime fees on your cell phone bill infuriate a lot of us. But what if your cell phone bill could make your life a little rosier? Well, pretty soon, your cell phone bill will be a factor in determining your credit score. And Wall Street Journal reporter Anna Maria Andriotis is here with some details. So, Anna Maria, you mean all this time I've been paying off my Verizon bill and my utility bills, which is also part of this, and it hasn't moved the needle on my credit rating one bit?
That's correct. What? That is correct. In most cases, credit reports and credit scores have not included this information, and that is about to change. Experian, one of the largest credit reporting firms in the U.S., has decided that it will start allowing consumers to add cell phone bill payments and utility payments into their credit reports. So there's two kind of interesting things here happening. One is, as you pointed out, that data that for the most part was not in people's credit reports will be added in and it'll be added in by consumers.
So when you pay your bills, just like you're paying off your credit card bills or department store bill, that all gets added in sort of behind the scenes.
By the lenders.
All right. So same thing?
Or does the consumer actually have to take action here? for decades credit reports and credit scores have been based on information that lenders and other parties like collection firms have been submitting to the credit reporting firms who then put it on the credit report. Now what's happening is that Experian is saying to the consumers you can add your payment data into your own credit report and the way that that would happen is is that consumers would basically link their checking account, for the most part it would be a checking account, that they have online bill pay set up with. So you know when you log into your bank account and you set up your payment for your electric bill, your cell phone bill, that information, once you link your account to Experian,
that information will just be getting fed into Experian. So on the credit report, it's not like you're going to have to take a step every single month. It would be a one-time thing where you set it up, you link your bank account to Experian, and Experian then is tracking where you're making recurring monthly payments to.
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