Clean Up Your Credit Scores: with guest Lisa Myers Part 2

Summary: This episode of The Perfect Property is part two of a discussion with Lisa Myers about cleaning up your credit score. Lisa has over 20 years of experience on the credit side of the mortgage industry and continues sharing tips, tricks, and information in this episode. 

Lisa begins by explaining why it’s so important to have a good credit score, then talks about hard and soft credit inquiries and how many you can have without affecting your score. She also goes over some recent changes regarding medical debt and tax liens and how they impact credit scores. Finally, Juli and Lisa talk about the very important topic of identity theft and how to protect yourself by placing security freezes.

What You’ll Learn: 

·         Why is it important to have a good credit score? (0:15)

·         What about Credit Karma and similar websites? (1:02)

·         Hard and soft credit inquiries (4:09)

·         How many credit inquiries can you have without affecting your score? (5:42)

·         Changes in the last few years and medical debt (6:45)

·         Tax liens removed from credit reports (7:48)

·         Medical debts (10:04)

·         Identity theft (14:58)

·         What is a security freeze and how do you place one? (16:04)

·         Does a security freeze cost money? (17:23)

·         Will a security freeze stop soft pulls and hard pulls? (20:55)

·         A real story of identity theft (21:53)

·         What is the average range for a FICO score? (25:57)

·         Summary of the important points (28:28)

 Key Points:

“A good credit score can mean the difference between renting and owning a home. It can mean the difference between a higher interest rate and a lower interest rate on anything.”

“The only way to know what your FICO score is if you’re looking to purchase something like a home or an auto is to have a lender or a creditor from that industry pull your credit report and your FICO score with it.”

“One of the big changes that did happen… was that they removed all tax liens from credit reports.”

“They’re now saying that medical collections cannot be reported on your credit report until they have been charged off by the creditor for at least six months.”

“A soft inquiry has no impact on your FICO score.”

“A security freeze… provides a freeze on your credit. No hard inquiry can come through. That’s the key.”

“Once you place that security freeze, you will receive a piece of mail from that bureau in the mail that will have what’s called a PIN code that is for you, only for your eyes, and that allows you to unlock your file.”

“The highest that we’ve seen is 847. I’ve never seen an 850. I’ve never seen a perfect 850 FICO score... I think the lowest that we’ve seen was a 336 or something like that.”

“Just because you have some derogatory information showing up on your credit report, it is not the end of the world and is not going to haunt you for the rest of your life.”

 Links: 

Credit Report: www.annualcreditreport.com 

Juli’s Email: [e-mail]

Juli’s Phone Number: 404-668-8975 (call or text)

The Perfect Property Website. www.theperfectproperty.com 

 

 

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