Credit Repair 101 – How to Make Your Credit Score Shiny and New

Today, we’re going to be talking about credit repair, how to improve your credit score, scams to avoid, and what you should and should not do to help make your credit score as shiny as it should be.

You can find Damon Day on his site.

If you have a question you’d like to ask on the Debt Free Dudes podcast, go to GetOutOfDebt.org/message or if someone wants to send in a question you can go to GetOutOfDebt.org/question.

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Transcript

Steve Rhode: So Damon, we’re talking about credit repair today. This is a subject that confuses a lot of people because they see these ads and they hear these things about how you can magically repair your credit. And the irony is that credit repair really is not that difficult. Is it?

Damon Day: No. No. It depends on what your definition of credit repair is, but to do what a lot of these companies do is not that difficult.

Steve Rhode: The goal for your credit report. The best example I have is you should think about your credit report, like a report card in school. If you got A’s, that should be reported. If you got D’s that should be reported on your report card. So a credit report is a credit report card.

And if you did well paying your debts. That should be on there. What should not be on your credit report is information that is inaccurate out of date does not belong to you, and it’s just plain wrong. Now that’s stuff that can be disputed. Now Damon, I think that a lot of people end up paying for what they think is some sort of magical solution to have accurate, but negative information removed from their credit report.

And that’s how they fall into a lot of scams. I’ve noticed that more signs are being posted on telephone poles in my area at least 15 feet up where nobody can get them that say, need your credit repaired call now. Damon. How often does that turn out to be a good thing for

Damon Day: people still post signs on telephone poles in your neighborhood?

Steve Rhode: The grass finally grew high enough on the main road that you can’t see the buy, the queen mattress sign anymore, but a.

Damon Day: Something tells me that guy does not have an office. Not that you need an office, but it’s kinda up there with the, we buy ugly houses call now. Yeah.

Steve Rhode: I still see some of those the goal in repairing your credit is to get it cleaned up and accurate. Now there are a couple of truths that people don’t understand. Your credit report does not have to contain all the accounts that you have. A credit report is not a listing of how many accounts you have at different creditors. There are three major credit bureaus. Experian Equifax and TransUnion.

And one might have some of your accounts. Another one might have some, and the third might have a mix of both the creditors normally only report to a credit bureau because they get a discount by reporting when they pull credit reports themselves. You can’t rely on your credit report and you certainly cannot rely on one credit bureau report to give you a full picture.

So what I suggest that people do. Damon is get a consolidated credit report. There are online sites like CreditKarma.com where you can get a two bureau report, but that’s not all three credit bureaus. If you want to get all three credit bureaus you can do that for free through AnnualCreditReport.com.

But here’s the kicker. Those credit reports don’t show credit scores. But Damon, I know that you’ve got something, you have an opinion about credit scores and how just wildly variable. They are.

Damon Day: Yeah, my quite colorful history with credit scores and the game that is credit reporting because it really is a game. And my famous line is, Hey, don’t hate the player, hate the game. But both sides are playing the game. And as far as variables go, it’s absolutely ridiculous.

You mentioned credit karma. I love credit karma. I think it’s a great tool. You can get your Equifax and your TransUnion report through credit karma. However, you can’t get your Experian. As you mentioned, you can only get two, but the score that you see on credit karma is not your FICO score.

It’s what they call a vantage 3.0. Score, which basically means nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not even real. I can’t remember exactly how they describe it, but it’s a, an approximation or essentially it’s a best guess that sucks of what your actual credit score is because it will usually vary easily a hundred points from your actual FICO.

It’s the model they use is not even close and FICO. If you want to get to the real score now and you’re cause you’re, say you’re wanting to buy a car or something and your bank says, oh, 680 score is the minimum. And if you have like over a 740, you’re going to get the best credit rating.

And so you go, okay, great. I want to see where I’m at, what you pull credit karma. It might tell you’ve got a 650 and you think, oh my gosh, I’m not going to be able even get a loan. But if you pay money and you actually go to like MyFico.com, which is the actual FICO site, and it will cost you like 50, 60 bucks.

And then they’ll try to hit you up for monitoring. It’s got, you gotta pay to play. You actually get your actual, real FICO scores. The number that the bank will get when they pull your credit and you pay for that your vantage 3.0 score on your credit karma might say 650, but your FICO might say 720.

That makes a big difference. So as if that wasn’t confusing enough, when you go to the myfico.com, you’ll see that it’s, you don’t just have one score, right? Number one, you’ve got four for each bureau. Each bureau scores will be different. And your Experian versus your TransUnion could also vary by 50, 60, 70 points, the same actual FICO score, but different reports cause different things are reported on it.

And then. If that’s not confusing enough, you’ll go in there and on the myFICO, you’ll see your FICO score for mortgages, your FICO score for auto loans, your FICO score for credit cards. And then if that’s not confusing enough, when you go into those, you’re going to see do you want your FICO five?

Do you want your FICO six? You want your FICO seven, your FICO eight. And now we have FICO nine. So now what the trick is to do is say, you want to get a loan from your credit union and they say you need a 740 for the best rate. Okay. Number one, you got to know what your credit score is. Number two, you got to know what bureau that bank, because different creditors will pull from different bureaus, right? It doesn’t do you any good to have a 740 Equifax? If that bank is going to pull TransUnion and TransUnion 690. So you want to know that ahead of time.

Steve Rhode: You got to know what version is.

Damon Day: I’m getting that right.

So you gotta know the bureau. You gotta ask the bank. What bureau are you gonna pull from? And then you have to ask what FICO version it’s usually going to be FICO eight or FICO nine. More and more banks are now finally converting to FICO nine, but those can vary 40 or 50 points. So before you start having banks pull your credit, you need to know your credit.

And if you’re purchase a home or a car or something you’re going to have to pay for it. But you start with credit karma. That’s fine. Go to annual credit report. That’s free. That’ll let you see what’s on your report, but it won’t give you the numbers. When you’re about ready, you go pay the money, go to MyFico.com and then figure out by calling that lender.

And I call up and most of the time they don’t know what I’m talking about. I have to educate them. I’ll call up and the, or rate is this or rate as this. And I said, What bureau do you pull from? They’ll usually know that and then I’ll hit them with what FICO version do you, does your institution use? And they usually go, yeah, they usually go huh? And they’ll have to put me on hold usually.

And then they’ll come back and they’ll be able to tell me a FICO eight or FICO nine. So I will know ahead of time before I allow that bank to pull my credit. I’ll know the number before they pull it. Where most consumers have no clue what the number’s going to be. And then they’re just confused when the number they thought they had is not the number of the bank tells them.

Steve Rhode: Now you can find out they’re going to pull a FICO nine and to make things even more parsed. Your bank might have a slightly different algorithm, how they calculate your score based on a FICO eight or FICO nine. Ultimately the only credit score that really matters is what your creditor pulls. And the goal here is it’s really difficult to play that knife’s edge of just getting across the line. Cause nobody knows where that line is, but if you pull your credit report and the biggest mistake I see people make Damon is they had some financial problems and then they just gave up.

I’m never going to use credit again, I’m only going to use a debit card and they leave their credit score.

In the crapper and they never worked to improve it. There are some easy things that people can do to improve their credit. The first one is getting all three credit bureau reports, whether it’s annual credit report.com. or someplace. Print them out and then look at them carefully and see what information is on those reports that is incorrect.

And if it’s incorrect, each of those credit bureaus has a dispute process. And this dispute process is what gets gamed so much by credit repair outfits. They just keep inundating these credit bureaus with dispute letters, hoping that they can get the negative information removed and then they scream success look what we did for you. But a problem with that is you can have negative information removed by a credit bureau, not hitting the dispute timelines correctly. It may be removed now, but the next time they dumped data like next quarter or next month, that account can come right back on your credit report.

So if you have accurate information it should stay there. If you have inaccurate information, you should follow each credit bureaus dispute process. You can supply all relevant information and any documents to prove the information is incorrect. And then here’s what will happen. The information will be reviewed about the dispute. The creditor will verify the accuracy of the information they’re reporting to the credit bureau and they will provide the credit bureau with hopefully a timely response. The credit report will be updated and you will get a new free copy of your credit report. Showing the disputed item is removed.

It generally takes 30 to 45 days for all that to happen. Have you had experience disputing items?

Damon Day: Yeah. You mentioned disputes.

Yeah it, you can submit these disputes. You actually, even through credit karma, credit karma is a great tool. I like it. You just can’t rely on it for your actual FICO scores. But you can dispute right directly with the annual credit report.com. Essentially.

What that does is it connects you to all three. Of the bureaus, Equifax TransUnion, Experian. So you click the link and you go to each, you pull down each report directly from the bureau, and then there’s a dispute link that you can do online. Credit karma has a similar process for, but again, only for Equifax and TransUnion, not for Experian where you can just go and dispute it.

It’s obviously a very grey area. You know what you’re disputing and why you’re disputing you technically can’t say, oh, that’s bad. So I want to dispute it. You can dispute anything you want, but again, it’s a gray area on what you’re allowed to dispute. And so what happens if you do send in a dispute depending on what it is and whether or not it’s a what somebody would consider a legitimate dispute or I want to clean up my credit and I don’t like this.

You’ll have mixed results. Some creditors will respond and it’ll stay on there. Other creditors won’t a lot of that has to do with whether or not say you’re disputing a past due balance that you have, and you technically still owe the money because it hasn’t been settled or resolved or paid or whatever.

That creditor is more likely to come back and verify that. And also if it’s like a debt, that’s just been idle for a while. You still owe it. You’re still within the statute of limitations. You haven’t gotten contacted from a creditor, oftentimes disputing it on your credit bureau. Could light a fire under the collection again to say, Hey, this guy, this account is causing a pain point for this individual. Maybe it’s a good time to start blowing up their phone again, to collect. So also be conscious of that. If you’re just going to start disputing. If you still actually owe money to these creditors, you might want to think twice about disputing that debt. If they haven’t been bothering you.

Steve Rhode: So here’s what happens if you have old negative items, you were late on a bill, something happened but more time that passes from that late payment, the less it impacts your score.

So when we’re talking about credit repair, I actually think that one of the things that people should focus on is having good new, active lines of credit. Don’t rush out to close all of your old accounts. People make that mistake far too many times.

Damon Day: Yeah. If they’re in good standing, don’t close them.

Steve Rhode: For example, your payment history is 35% of your credit score. However, your credit history, how long you’ve had that is 15%. So if you don’t want to just go and close all your old accounts. And you also don’t want to run up your balance more than 30% of your available credit.

And today that number is even lower. Keep it below 10% of your available credit in order to get the maximum score each month. You’ve had problems in the past there in the past. You’re focusing now on doing well with current credit and you have two or three unsecured credit cards that are open and are using them responsibly.

The best thing that you can do to repair your credit at this point is just let some time pass and you will see your score going up and up.

Damon Day: Yeah. And the biggest thing, especially now is that utilization ratio where you mentioned, it used to be 30% was a bigger hit, and now it’s down to 10%, which means if you have amongst all your cards, say $20,000 in available credit.

If you spend two or $3,000 on a card, all of a sudden you’re taking a hit to your FICO score. Even if you’re planning on paying that off in a couple of months, you could take a huge hit. So be conscious of that. If you’re trying to, purchase a car or a mortgage or something, that’s going to require credit, make sure you don’t go out there and put a couple of larger purchases on your cards if it’s going to push you over a 10% utilization rate, which is essentially how much available credit you have versus how much outstanding debt you have on those cards.

But that’s one of the ways you can game the system. If you’re getting ready to get a mortgage or something like that. And you have outstanding balances on the cards. If you pay those down dramatically, before you get the mortgage, you can literally raise your score. 50, a hundred, even more points in a 60 day period, just by getting that debt off of there.

Steve Rhode: Well, a very important point. You mentioned 60 days, you look at your credit report and it lists your balance being higher than it is today. That is because the balance reported to the bureaus is not a live balance. It is not your balance today. It is the balance at the time that it was last reported. And that depends on how often your creditors report information that might be weekly.

Might be every two weeks it might be once a month. But you’re going to have to pay down that balance and give it a little bit of time to be reported accurately.

Damon Day: When you mentioned closing your cards, the other issue with closing the cards. Not only does it hurt your credit history, especially if you’ve had that card for 10 years and good history, but it hurts your utilization ratio because if you close the card, you don’t plan on using it, but you had say $10,000 in available credit and there’s no debt on there at all. You close that card. That $10,000 in available credit goes away. So now instead of say having 50,000 in available credit, and you can spend up to five grand on those cards before it dings you, now that 10,000 goes off and you only have 40,000 in available credit. So keep your old cards open that are in good standing.

If you’re trying to get the highest score possible.

Steve Rhode: And the highest score possible assists you in many ways. Right now you’re getting the cheapest credit that’s available, the lower interest rates, you’re getting better terms. And so this whole idea of avoiding credit, I’m going to ignore credit. I’m not going to have any credit cards.

I’m not going to have any loans or anything that’s reported. That certainly is one way to live your financial life. I get it. I understand. But unfortunately finances in the United States are all governed by your credit report and your credit score. If you just turn your back on your credit report.

And even if you don’t have a lot of negative information, but you just go away, your score will drop. For example I looked at my my father is deceased. He died several years ago and the other day I took a peek at his credit score. And it has dropped by 200 points only because there is no activity on it anymore.

I always makes me talk a little, when people go, I went to get a mortgage, but they wouldn’t give me the best rate. I don’t have any debt. Yeah. You know what, but you don’t, you’re not playing the game. Hate the game, not the player. So you’ve got to have. Good credit. And you need to think about having a good credit score and you need to look over your credit reports.

At least once a year. I do look at my Equifax TransUnion and Experian credit reports and make sure there’s nothing negative on there. And you need to massage and be responsible for your credit reports. Just like you are about paying your debts on time.

Damon Day: Yeah. And no matter your stance on it, I don’t think an argument can be made that having a good credit score. Doesn’t make your life easier when it comes to certain things . You have more opportunities with a good FICO score than you do with no FICO score. It’s just the way our society is good, bad, or indifferent like it or not. Everything comes down to that number. And I don’t know if I’ve ever told the story on the podcast, but I know, the story of, it’s about, I don’t know, 12, 15 years ago. I didn’t have great credit, but I, I had good income and I needed to get a loan. I don’t remember what it was for, but I remember I got all dressed up.

I went down to the bank, and I was like, okay, I gotta impress him. I gotta sell what I w whatever it is I wanted to do. I couldn’t remember. And I was kinda nervous about, and I had my speech all ready to go. I needed the money and what I was going to do with it and all this stuff.

So I go in there, I go into my bank and this is my bank. And I went up to the teller, said, Hey, who can I speak to about a personal loan? And she points to the wall where there’s a telephone and all defeated. I walk up to the telephone, I pick it up I could have done it at my house.

I got all dressed up for no reason. And basically what happened was they pulled my credit score and denied me. There was no selling my idea or pitching my, why I needed the money and why it was a good credit. Those days are over. Unless you live in Kansas or some Midwest states, if you live in a major metropolitan area, forget it.

If you don’t have a good number, you’re not going to get the loan.

Steve Rhode: Yeah. So the reason credit scores exist and credit scores are a by-product of credit reports. The reason they exist is because. I guess it’s probably now 40 years ago. Creditors wanted to move into some way that they could extend credit at a more rapid pace than what they were doing, which was having a human look at and approve or reject credit applications.

And the way they could do that was have a computer that would screen people rapidly and make a decision based on the score. And that’s all it’s used for. It is not an indication of how well you manage your finances, how well you do, how responsible you are or anything else. It’s only a representation of how well you have gamed the system to have a high score.

Damon Day: Yeah. And then unfortunately there’s nothing in the FICO model that says, did this guy come into the bank in a three-piece suit? Like I don’t get any credit for that. It’s BS, man. I’m gonna come on. Look how I’m dressed. Come on my car is clean.

Steve Rhode: It used to be back in the very beginning that there were five Cs that were the pinnacles, the piers to establishing credit for.

And one of the things that the loan officer, the actual human at the bank lender would look at was not only your capacity to repay, but also make a determination about your character and willingness to repay. And that is what’s gone away. It is now only about the number. So if you want to improve your credit, but nobody will give you credit right now.

One of the things that you can do is you can get a secured card. Damon, what’s a secured card.

Damon Day: It’s a card that you essentially put up your own collateral, which is usually cash, and they loan it back to you and charge you interest.

Steve Rhode: Yeah. And you get a credit line that is reported on your credit bureau report.

At least one of them that shows that you were extended credit and you can prove that using responsibly after time you can ask for an increase in your limit. You might even get it converted to an unsecured line of credit. And that’s what I did after my bankruptcy decades ago, and that can help improve your credit.

So let time pass on the old stuff, dispute stuff on your credit reports that is negative and not yours and work hard to rebuild a good credit.

Damon Day: Many moons ago when I was a young lad I didn’t have much credit. I had a little bit of money and I wanted to build credit and I, I would assume, this was 20 years ago, plus I would assume this would still work.

Tell me what you think about this idea because it worked well for me by. I had a thousand dollars saved up and I didn’t really have much credit, but I wanted to start establishing those lines of credit so much along the same lines of getting the secured credit card. What I did was I went into a credit union, opened up an account, said, Hey, look, I want establish credit.

I want to deposit this thousand dollars and I want to get a secured loan. For a thousand dollars based on that, obviously they gave it to me. No problem. Here’s your, we’re going to take your thousand dollars. We’re going to give it right back to you and we’re going to charge you interest.

And I got that. It was like an installment loan over 12 payments. So I walked in with a thousand dollars. I walked out with a new loan that was reporting all my credit and a check for a thousand dollars that the bank gave me back. That was my loan. I went down the street to another credit union. Because remember I only started with $1,000.

So I have now I have a thousand dollars secured loan secured by the money that I gave them. And then they gave back to me. So I walked out with another thousand, went to the next bank, said the same thing. Gave them that check from the other bank as the deposit for the collateral. They gave me a secured loan for a thousand walked out of that bank to a third bank, did the same thing.

So essentially what I did was I got three different loans from three separate banks for $1,000 each, but I only put up a thousand dollars and I ended up with three, three, $1,000 fully secured loans.

Steve Rhode: Yeah, that, that does work. But the key here is you need to find out today, you need to find out whether or not that particular credit union is actually reporting to credit bureaus, because if they’re not, it doesn’t do any good.

But if they are, it can give you a little bit of juice.

Damon Day: We think, yeah. Thanks for stating the obvious there, captain. Obviously you want to make sure they report it. Yeah.

Steve Rhode: Yeah. Cause you know, especially with credit unions, the not every loan, gets reported.

Damon Day: Yes, and you are going to, and keep in mind, you are going to be paying interest on those loans.

So make sure, you can afford the monthly payment because I also had three different monthly payments back to that secured loan. But, again, it’s not a great deal from a financial standpoint that was done to accelerate my, my, building of my credit, where I could get, three separate loans, even though I only had a thousand dollars myself.

Steve Rhode: No totally smart. So what else, Damon, what else do people run into? Oh, I know what they run into with credit repair I alluded to it in the beginning. They run into all these scams. So the scams say we’re going to make all the negative information go away. I’ve actually seen people’s credit scores go down after they do that because no credit is worse than bad credit. It’s better to have bad credit than no credit.

And so if your report is full of all negative things and they make them all go away. Now you got no credit that doesn’t do any good. So one of the things is that people get charged a lot of money under the pretense that they’re going to make everything go away.

I’m not a fan of everyone has to do everything themselves. If you want to hire somebody else to do something. Go at it. I get your lawn mowed, your car repaired, whatever it is, you don’t have to do that stuff your yourself. And you also don’t have to worry about the credit repair yourself.

You could hire somebody else. However, under the heading of being responsible financially, I think it’s imperative for people to look at their credit report at least once a year, while you’re looking at it. You’re looking for inaccurate negative information that’s on there and you’re going to dispute that.

But the bigger thing is you need to have some responsibility of looking at your own credit report because you want to look for things that might indicate that you are the victim of identity theft. Somebody else is taking out loans in your name, and you want to look for those on your credit report.

So if you’re pulling your credit report anyway, and you’re looking to make sure that it is accurate, there’s no identity theft on it. There’s nothing that’s really gonna hurt you. That’s fraudulent. And you accidentally see something that’s negative and inaccurate. It really doesn’t take much to dispute it.

Like you said, Damon, you can click on a link and you can submit information and you can dispute it and that’s, you don’t need to pay thousands of dollars to somebody else to do that. That’s something you can do yourself.

Damon Day: Yeah. And the biggest thing, is if you are going to hire somebody to do it you need to hire somebody that’s, I hate to say not a big company, but that’s, when you hire these big companies that are out there, marketing sales advertising, They’re just going to throw a whole bunch of stuff against the wall typically and see what sticks and all they’re going to do is send these form letters that these days, most of the credit bureaus, when they get these form letters, at least initially they’re sending even ignore them.

Sometimes they don’t even submit them to the creditor because it’s the 1 million letter that’s the same exact way that they know it. They know what it is, it’s not a big surprise. Oh, the consumer wrote this. So you want to find somebody that’s going to actually. Look at your individual credit report and review that with you and say, okay what are your goals here?

And then give you a realistic idea of, what they may or may not be able to do, because sometimes it’s we can send some disputes and maybe you get lucky, maybe you don’t, but nobody can guarantee any kind of specific result because you can’t force a creditor to do something.

So you know, whether or not it’s worth hiring somebody to do something, you first got to figure out what they think they can do. How much it’s going to cost and then whether or not that’s worth it for them to do it for you. But a lot of these companies where you hire them, they’re just going to literally throw these form letters, dispute everything that’s on your credit report.

Like you said, sometimes make your credit score worse because they’re not picking and choosing what they’re disputing. They’re just pretty much disputing whatever, everything on there. And you’re right. You don’t want to if there’s something that is maybe has a 30 day late it gives a good example of you saying they can make it worse.

You have a card that had a 30 day, late two years ago, and oh, that looks bad. But that card you’ve had open for 20 years. And other than that, one 30 day, late two years ago is it’s great history. You don’t want to get rid of that trade line from a 30 day late from two years ago, because the benefit you would get is almost nil.

In fact, a lot of times, things about you have an old account is, it’s a year past due or something like that. And even if you look in things like credit karma, and a lot of these services, now that you can get have modeling what’s the word I’m looking for? It has a calculator yeah.

Yeah. Like If you miss a payment, what will happen to your credit score? Like you can model that. What about this? What if this? And there’s a lot of them now where you look at that. If you have this old debt that’s in collections and it’s a thousand dollars and you pay it in full, your score will go up, 20 points.

And then it goes, if you settle it for less than the balance, your score will go up 18 points. And all of a sudden you’re like, wait a minute. So if I have a $10,000 account and I only give them 4,000. It will score will go up 18 points. But if I give them 10,000, it’s going to get me only two points.

That’s good information to know, two points might not be worth an extra $6,000. So sometimes paying old debts in full can actually make it worse. Especially if you know that card is, two or three years past due, sometimes making that payment, even if it’s a payment in full could actually bring down your score if it’s that old.

Steve Rhode: So what these. Companies are doing that are either scamming or scheming to take money from consumers. They’re not necessarily the person next door. These are mass market companies that are trying to sell as many consumers, some sort of credit repair product as possible. Here is an example of the consumer financial protection bureau.

Shut down prime marketing holdings, Parkview credit, national credit advisor and credit expert operations. They had. 50,000 consumers that had paid $20 million for their credit repair services. And these companies were charged with charging illegal advanced fees, misleading consumers about the benefits, misrepresenting the cost and failed to disclose the limits on a money back guarantee.

If you do hire a credit repair outfit to help you they cannot charge you a fee until at least six months has passed from the time that you received the benefit. That means if there’s something negative on your credit report and they work on your behalf to get it removed, it was inaccurate. They cannot charge you a fee until six months in the future.

That’s what the law. So don’t fall for these advanced fee credit repair things. If you listen to the advice that we gave you in this podcast, you will go 95% of the way to repairing your credit and getting it on the right path.

Damon Day: Yes.

Steve Rhode: All right. Anything else? Come to mind?

Damon Day: Now I think we covered a lot of it. There’s, we could talk for hours about this stuff.

Steve Rhode: Yeah. What is your takeaway when you hear the phrase credit repair, what is the takeaway that you think that our listeners should have.

Damon Day: When I hear the words credit repair keep your expectations realistic.

And before you think about hiring anybody, you should have an understanding of why your score is the way it is and whether or not it’s realistic to think it can improve, especially in a short amount of time. This whole, I got to get a mortgage in 30 days, so I need to raise my score. 50 points.

Yeah. Might take away unless you pay off a lot of debt really quickly, then it could happen.

Steve Rhode: Yeah. And then hopefully it gets reported fast. But my takeaway is the mortgage example. If you think you’ve got a home purchase that’s coming up in the next three or four months, it’s something that you want to do.

I believe that you should talk to a mortgage broker as quickly as possible. And a broker is somebody that represents a number of different lenders and talk to them and let them look at your credit score. And give you some guidance and advice about what expectations you should have and what is the best strategy?

Because in my experience, mortgage brokers will guide people to play the game and direct them to take the best actions possible, to increase their score, to what it needs to be, to get them the best loan possible. Don’t wait til the last minute think ahead.

All right, Damon, another successful debt-free dudes podcast. Thank you so much for talking about credit repair. And if people have a question they can go to GetOutOfDebt.org/question. If you’d like to leave us a message, go to GetOutOfDebt.org/message, and you can leave us a voicemail. All right, Damon have a brilliant debt free day.