News to Know: Educates listeners on fraud prevention, identity theft, credit management, and financial literacy.

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
I am Rashan McDonald, a host of weekly Money Making
Conversation Masterclass show. The interviews and information that this show
provides are for everyone. It's time to stop reading other
people's success stories and start living your own. If you
want to be a guest on my show, please visit
our website, Moneymaking Conversations dot com and click the be
a Guest button. Press submit and information will come directly

(00:23):
to me. Now let's get this show started. My guest
is the senior director of Public Education and Advocacy for Experience.
He leaves experienced national consumer education programs and works with
consumer advocates, financial educators, media and others to help consumers
increase their ability to understand and manage their personal finances
and protect themselves from fraud and identity there please, welcome

(00:47):
to Money Making Conversation Masterclass.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Rod Griffin. How you doing rock fantastic, Glad to be here.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Well, thank you for coming on the show, because I'm
gonna tell you some Rod. My email my phone is
being in and dated, would messages that I don't know
if it's real or not. It looks like it may
be a bank, it looks like it may be a
credit call. Tell me what's going on, because I want
to start our conversation with what you said right here,

(01:14):
educating us about fraud and identity. That.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
Yeah, so we all get the notices of data breaches,
we all get the emails. I get them too, and
sometimes phone calls as well. And you know, fraud is
something that everybody's after today. I sometimes tell people that
the currency of today isn't necessarily cash. It's information, and

(01:39):
a lot of times it's personal information. It's your identity
because if they can steal your identity, they can use
it to do all sorts of things. They can use
it to try to apply for frauduct credit accounts, they
can use it to apply for IDs, for government benefits,
for all sorts of things. So the identity these are

(02:00):
busy trying to trick us into giving them our information,
our personal and private information, our financial information, so that
they can use it to their gain and against us.
So it's a huge problem and they're getting more sophisticated
about it. And artificial intelligence is something that's actually something
we're even more concerned about today because you may not

(02:24):
even be talking to a person now or getting an
email from a person that could be a machine that
is posing as someone you know and playing on those
emotional heartstrings to get you to give them information, and
that's what they want. So we have to learn to
kind of recognize those and to know when it probably
isn't someone that we know or love, or someone we

(02:45):
shouldn't share information with. The one example, if the bank
asks you for your account number, it's not your bank right.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
A call you asking for anything in a past word,
asking for an account number, that's not legit. But again, experience,
I'm a guy who is tries to keep my credit
score right. Tell everybody what exactly is experience and how
does it benefit mean?

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, so yeah, experience. We're best known as one of
the big three credit reporting companies, so the experience trending equifacts,
so we collect and share in importance with the fair
credit reporting active course, the credit information, so the accounts
that you have and how you're repaying those debts. So
that's one piece of our business. Talk about fraud, identity theft,

(03:32):
we also have a business that helps companies identify attempts
to steal their information or help them recover when they've
had a breach. We also help protect people from fraud,
identity staff. So we use information to help businesses lenders,
for example, recognize when someone's trying to use information that

(03:52):
they've stolen to get your information. We have monitoring services
that can alert you when something pops up in your
credit history that could kate you're a victim of fraud,
so we help make you aware of potential attempts for fraud.
We also have a business that is an identity verification service.
For example, if you're working with a Social Security administration

(04:13):
and you go in to get your social Security account information,
so how much money you get paid when you retire,
which are so long way from but hope to get
there some day. That we have an identity service, so
they're using experience information so when you go in, they're
matching it to information that helps them ensure you are
you and not someone who's trying to access your account fraudulently.

(04:36):
So we are working on a number of fronts to
help protect people from proud identity to have to help
them improve their financial lives, to help them get gain
access to information that can help them be more successful.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Now, it is really interesting, and I've heard this the
word savvy and then the word financially savvy. Now I
don't know what that means. So help me and help
my audience gain a grip on what financially savvy means.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Yeah. When I think of being financially savvy, it's when
you control your money and it doesn't control you. So
you understand how many works you use financial tools to
your advantage. So credit is a financial tool. Of debt's
the financial problem. And if you can use credit well,
it can give you a financial advantage. For example, if

(05:23):
you have a credit card and you get cash back,
or you get airline miles and you make charges with
that card discounts on purchases and then pay the balance
in full, you're not taking on debt, but you are
getting a financial advantage. That's a financially savvy thing to do.
You know, when you understand vesting, which I'm sure you
talk to your listeners about often, or saving and having

(05:45):
that emergency savings account when you budget. We all hate
that word, but it's really a tool to help you
be in control of your money rather than it controlling you.
And that's what financially savvy, being financially savy is all about.
To me.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
I'm speaking with Rod Griffin. He's the senior director of
Public Education and Advocation for Experience. You know, I'm gonna
tell you this. When the credit score. You know, my daughter,
she's so proud she has an eight hundred plus. You know,
daddy's kind of wore down. I got some credit. My
hangs between high sixty and middle seven hundreds. You know,

(06:18):
high six hundred, middle seven hundred. So she laughs at
me a lot. I said, but you know you're not
living a life yet. Now when you say credit score,
I'm just read it out to my audience. They aren't
aware what credit score is. Poor is three hundred to
five seventy nine. Fair is five eighty to six six nine.
Good is six seventy to seven three nine. Very good

(06:41):
is seven forty to seven ninety nine. Excellent is eight
hundred to eight fifty. Now excellent. Everybody wants to be there.
Like I said, I hang in that. That's seven hundred
mid seven hundred range. How does this score put together?

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Rod? Yeah, and it's it's just to complicate things further,
there isn't just one score, so there's lots of different
score and so there are three credit reports and that's
where we have to start. Every credit score uses the
information from your credit report to do the calculation. If

(07:18):
you're buying a car, they have a credit score that
just to surprise you, if Bico has a score for
buying a car auto lending score that goes to nine hundred,
not just eight fifty. So if if you want to
win a bet that you have the best score, get
your auto score, you might have a better n eate
fifty or win every time. But the thing to understand

(07:38):
is they're all looking at the same stuff. They're all
the informational credit report, and they're all looking at number one,
how you're paying your bills and you're paying your bills
on time or are they late, so like payments are
going to hurt your score. The second thing they're looking
at is are your balances on your credit cards really
high compared to the credit limits. So if you can
keep your credit card balances down and you pay your

(07:58):
bills on time, you're going to have good credit scores
because everything else builds on those two things. They look
at the length of your credit history, so how long
have you been paying bills and paying them on time.
They look at the mix of kinds of accounts you have,
so do you have car loan or own credit cards
so on. That sort of happens with time as you
use credit and you'll develop that. They look at what's

(08:19):
happened recently. So if you applied for new accounts, have
you reduced your debts? Have you taken on more debt?
So if you're paying your bills on time, keeping your
balance as little, you will have good credit scores. It's
just behavior over time. I sell people banks like people
who are boring. They don't want anything surprising. Just pay
the bills on time, keep the balances low. Do that

(08:39):
over and over and over you'll have good credit scores.
So there's no real secret. The important thing get your
credit report, know what's in it. It's free. You can
get it once a week from each of the three bureaus.
At annual credit report dot com. You can get a
free monitoring service from Experience. We'll give you a free
report every thirty days, along with the FICO eights where

(09:00):
and most importantly, the factors that are driving that score.
So when you get a credit report and score from Experience,
we give you at least four and sometimes five risk
factors that explain what is having the most negative effect
on the score, so that you can look at your
credit report and pay at what you need to work on. So, yeah,
the thing I tell people is the number doesn't matter,

(09:21):
and they look at me like I'm crazy, because it does.
Of course it does. Yeah, well, yes it does when
you're talking to the bank and they're trying to get
a loan. But if we're just like we're talking right now,
you know, the number doesn't tell you much. But if
you get your credit report and a number, then you

(09:41):
have something to work on. You have context around it,
so you can look at the risk factors that go
with it, and look at your credit report and say, okay,
it says my balances on my credit cards are too high,
Well here's the credit cards that have high balances. That's
what I need to focus on. So it empowers you
to act. If all you have is a number, you
can't do anything. You know, if I said I went

(10:03):
to bet that you're about a seven to eighty, what
do you do about that? But if I said, you
know your balances are about thirty percent of your credit
limit on a card, now you know what you can
do to reduce amount and to what you need to
focus on. So that's what we want to do. Is
try not to focus too much on the number, focus
on the credit history. The number gives you a place

(10:23):
to start from.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
I'm Jason Rod. You've already told me some information. I
didn't know the word free reports are free, and you
said alerts are free. I didn't know that. Why I
just got to ask you, why don't I know, Rushan
MacDonald know that Experience you can register for free to
get free reports, free alerts and free scores send to

(10:47):
your email box on a regular basis. Help me educate
me because I'm sure a lot of people listening didn't
know that either. Because I'm being inundated with all this
fraudulent stuff and experience having stuff that can bring value
to me help me become financially savvy and improve my
financial help.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
Yeah. So there we have, of course different levels of service.
We are business, but we have at the base level.
You go to our app, so you can download our
app on your phone or your mobile device, or you
can go to Experience dot com and enroll in our
free monitoring service. And you do, you get a free
credit report once a month, you get a free FICO
eight score, and the respectors go with it. So the

(11:31):
exchange is will offer you potential access to credit cards
you might qualify for. You can tell us here's the
things I'm trying to do. The most powerful word in
credit and finance in general, I think is no too
little letters. So if you'll get offers, you don't want
them to say no, and that will inform you with
your credit score, your credit report, and give you the

(11:53):
power to act on it. The annual credit report. Dot
Com is the free government required site, and you can
get a free report from each of the three credit
bureaus once a week, so you get more than one
hundred a year if you want them. I guess I
mean quite that many, but you can get them. They
typically don't include a credit score, so you can get

(12:15):
free credit reports. If you're a victim of fraud, you
can get free credit reports. So if you had to
experience dot Com fraud, if you believe you're a victim
or maker or may have been or are, will give
you a free report along with the ability to add
a free fraud alert, and then you can get reports
and take additional actions if you need to. So there's
no real reason to pay for a credit report self. Today.

(12:38):
You can get free reports, and I always tell people
you should get a report. Why don't they Usually they
tell me they're afraid to see what's in it.

Speaker 3 (12:46):
Please don't go anywhere. We'll be right back with more
Money Making Conversations Masterclass. Welcome back to Money Making Conversation
Master last with me Rashaun McDonald.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
My identity was stolen and so that's frightening because you're helpless.
You see these credit card bills coming down. There was
a several stores. They brought a computer over here, they
brought food over here, and it was just shocking. But
the only way I could get it back was I'm
gonna just tell you experience saved my credit, you know,

(13:27):
with the alerts. I went to you guys, I told
you I had fraud was happening. You reacted immediately, and
then the alerts saved me and they started blocking and
it would call me and contact me, is hey, is
this you? Is this you make a setting up this account?
Is this you? To get it cleaned up? It took
about bout a year, but I got back back on

(13:49):
my feet, and so that goes to my next question.
Establishing your credit rod and rebuilding your credit there are
two different things. How does ones establish their credit and
then how do they rebuild it.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
Yeah, so you're right, two different things and having access
to credit history. Having a credit report is really important
in the financial world. It's one of the first things
that people will often look at. So for example, people
don't know that when you apply for an apartment lease,
they look at a credit report. If you're applying for

(14:22):
utility service, they'll look at a credit report. When you
get a cell phone, they're going to look at your
credit report. So we know about credit cards or getting
a home on that sort of thing, but it's other
parts of their life too, So establishing credits very important.
Several ways you can do that. One you can have
a family member, friend and you as an authorized user
to an account and then that account would be reported

(14:43):
as part of your credit report. You could apply maybe
get qualified for a small loan and have that reported,
but that often is difficult to do. So experience also
is created something we call Experience Go. When you enroll
in our app, if you do not have a credit
report with us, we'll ask you some questions and we'll
actually create a credit report for you. So you name

(15:04):
your address, self security numbers, some other details. I'll ask
you for a live selfie, so if you wink or
smile so we know it's you, We'll create a credit
report and all that will have in it is your
identifying information. From there, we have something we call Experience Boost.
Experience Boost actually lets you add your cell phone payments,

(15:25):
positive information, not negative, only positive information, but your positive
cell phone payments, positive utility payments, positive streaming services things
like Netflix, Ulu, your rent potentially, so we work with
a number of property management companies, your insurance payments, and
we can capture up to two years in information. Add

(15:46):
that to your credit report. So it's possible that if
you don't have a credit report at all, with experience,
to go from no credit history to having a credit
report plus a number of accounts credit scores, not having
a report to have a score to scores in the
six hundred and thirty range we've seen in some instances
just in a matter of minutes. So get you started.
Not a great score, it's going to get you going.

(16:09):
And so that's critic call is just having that credit report,
because that's.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
Going to just saying but consistent payments. If you have
a debit call, that debit call you have your gas
bill or your rent or your Netflix account tied to
that debit card that shows consistent payments, that's what you're
talking about, and that in turn can be inputed into
your experiment account. It starts building a base.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
Right and so with Experience Boosts, we connect to you
give us your permission, so it's permission based, and tell
us I want to add these accounts, and this is
the savings account or checking out, So like a debit card,
checking account or credit card you pay it with and
we're able to then capture those payments and for each
of them you tell us you want to add, will
add an account to your credit report. So and then

(16:57):
we'll immediately show you your score results too. So we
give you another free report and a score when you
start the process, and then we give you a reportant
score when you finish en rolling, and you can see
if there's a difference if you are beginning to build
credit or you're working to rehabil it. Well, I think
it's rehabilitate your credit or rebuild it. For most people,
that's when they see the most impacts. If you have

(17:17):
thin credit file, fewer than five accounts, or you've had
scores of less than six hundred eighty or so on
a fi COO eight score. That's who will typically see
the most benefit because there's just not much history there
to calculate score with. So and it's free again, it's free,
and it's permission based. If you don't want to continue,
you can tell us to stop. We'll remove the accounts.

(17:39):
So again we're trying to give people control of that
information and to make sure that they have a full
picture because those companies might report the negative information if
you don't make those payments, but they don't typically report
the positive information.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
Now as you're building your account, are rebuilding your account?
What are there any additional steps that I've missed in
here in your conversation.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
Yeah, so several things. Experience boosts might help in that
regard as well. You know, if you've had some issues
and life happens. We all know and I've had those
experiences and some things can and so you take steps
to start to recover get your report know it's there.
Experience boosts might help in those instances because you're adding
positive history. And then it's about you know, having a

(18:22):
small account making the payments on time every single time,
and that's critical work with experience to help you identify
what needs to be take care of if you've been
a victim of fraud. I was too. I actually had
my tax forms were stolen, and so there was a
tax file of my name.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
So really you like me, You know, that's like when
it happens raw, it's like you just feel so helpless
and then you start trying to figure out how it happens.
And I think another thing that people need to do
is like I use my credit card a lot, and
you really should audit your monthly bill. Sometimes they'll drop

(19:04):
little low payments monthly, like twenty five dollars or fifteen dollars,
and they'll just build up over time, and you don't know.
I've caught that on my credit card statement because I
run a business, and so because people will sell your
credit card information off and people will start charging monthly,
low monthly charges that you might not recognize, but it's

(19:26):
so low that you don't have time to go back
and worry about trying to identify because give her to
any charge off of a credit card is not credit
card bill is not easy. Now, rock you know, I'm
trying to maintain a financial savvy behavior my health. Should

(19:46):
we prepare or can we prepare the prior year before
you go into the new year being financially healthy?

Speaker 1 (19:54):
Absolutely, And you know, it's about setting goals. And I
always tell people, you know, talking about money can be hard,
and so yeah, I use my personal life. My wife
and I talk about money all the time, but we're
usually not talking about money when you think about it later.
So a money conversation doesn't have to be, you know,

(20:18):
a confrontational sort of thing for us. It could be
do we want to go out to dinner tonight or
do we want to wait until the weekend because we
want to do something later? So where are we going
to spend that money? It's a real question, but it's
a goal setting. Do we want to have a vacation
in next year? So we start talking about personal goals

(20:38):
and goals we have together rather than the money itself.
And so I tell people start from there because it
makes start from a goal perspective. What do you want
to do in life? And that could be this month,
it could be next year, it could be in five years,
and set those goals and then start looking at what
is the money equation? How do I make sure I

(20:59):
have the financial resources to achieve those goals and it
helps set up more positive approach instead of letting money
become a problem and then having to figure out how
to recover from a problem. Set a goal and start
looking forward, and check your credit report. Make sure that
you're setting a site savings, build a budget, call it
spending plan if you like. I have a college professor

(21:21):
friend who does that. So it doesn't like budget. Okay,
I'm from Texas, some kind of stubborn. It's a budget.
I'm gonna call it a budget. Just call it.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
Is no state income taxes Texas.

Speaker 1 (21:31):
This is true.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Your good brother over there, I'm in George. They're killing
me there, they're killing me.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
Rob.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
I'm gonna tell you this, Rob, you know, and just
listening to you, and I hope everybody's listening to just
when you're doing. If you if you're buying groceries and
you got a grocery account, a loyalty plan, get it.
I do that. I get discounts on my gas. If
I buy groceries on a Friday, I get triple points

(21:57):
which go to my gas. I have a credit card
where if I buy charges on my credit card, it
gets me faster on my Frequent Flyer plan, and then
on my frequent Flyer plan, I got membership miles. That's
what you just talking about being savvy when it comes
to how you dealing with your finances and things like that.
And I think the big takeaway or and hearing you

(22:19):
talk about experience this just look at what's out there,
you know, and make sure you're aware of the advantages,
because you there are some things that can be saved
with You're in car insurance.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
Right yeah, and so exactly right. You're living my life
because I just bought gas a ninety cents a gallop
because of my grocery card, right right, you know, so
the same thing. And when it comes to car insurance,
same issue. You know, it's insurance is expensive. We've seen
what inflation has done over the last couple of years.
Insurance rates are up, and Experience actually has introduced another

(22:52):
we're talking about what experience does. We've introduced an Experience
Insurance Auto insurance marketplace, and we help you shop for
better insurance, work with forty of the largest insurance providers
in the country, and we help find the best rates
based on where you live, what you need kind of
insurance levels, meeting the minimum requirements and try to help

(23:14):
you shop apples to apples. What we found is for
people that are working with our marketplace, they save on
average about eight hundred dollars a year, so not just
a small amount of money. And the other thing that
we'll do is help shop for you because shopping for
insurance can be difficult. You want to make sure you're
getting the same offers for the same coverages, want to

(23:35):
make sure you're meeting your state minimum requirements for auto insurance,
for example, and it can be difficult and confusing. So
we will monitor for you. If you change insurance providers
with us, we'll monitor for you. If we find a
better rate, we'll tell you and you can decide whether
you want to then shop for change providers and get
you an even better rate as they come along, so

(23:55):
you don't have to continually shop yourself. Wow.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
He's a senior director of Public Education Advocation for Experience.
I'm gonna tell you, I want to thank you for
coming on Money Making Conversation. My big takeaway is and
I want my audience there because some people I don't
want to do coupons. I don't want to shop like that.
I shop with coupons. I we shopped so much that

(24:21):
I get free food. Right, they'll send me a coupon saying, hey,
here's some free this, here's some free this, here's some
free this. Because they want my business and so and
some things you know, will be six dollars, eight dollars,
nine dollars savings on that particular sale if I didn't
come in there. And I think the big walk away
is just be financially savvy, just just see what's out there, because,

(24:44):
like you said, when you got that ninety cents off
off your gas bill and filling up that when I
get three cents off or I get ten cents off,
I get forty cents off per gallon. Now per gallon,
that goes a long way. Thank you for coming on
money Making Conversation Matter, Rob, I hope you enjoyed it.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
This has been another edition of Money Making Conversations Masterclass
hosted by me Rashaan McDonald. Thank you to our guests
on the show today, and thank you our listening audience. Now,
if you want to listen to any episode or want
to register to be a guest on my show, visit
Moneymakingconversations dot com. Our social media handle is money Making conversations.

(25:25):
Join us next week and remember to always leave with
your gifts. Keep winning,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}News to Know: Educates listeners on fraud prevention, identity theft, credit management, and financial literacy.