Podcasts about payment history

Are we Too obsessed with Credit Scores? In this episode we discuss Credit scores, particularly FICO scores, are numerical representations of creditworthiness, calculated using factors like payment history and credit utilization.While not universally required, good credit can significantly impact various aspects of life, from mortgage rates to insurance premiums. Responsible credit management, including timely payments and low utilization, is key to building and maintaining a healthy credit score.Your FICO score ranges from 300 to 850 and is calculated using five main factors:1. Payment History (35%): The heavyweight champion of your score2. Credit Utilization (30%): How much of your available credit you're using3. Length of Credit History (15%): Your credit age matters4. Credit Mix (10%): Different types of credit accounts5. New Credit (10%): How often you apply for new creditContact Chris:https://heavymetal.money⁠https://www.facebook.com/MoneyHeavyMetal⁠https://x.com/MoneyHeavyMetal⁠https://www.instagram.com/chrisluger⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@heavymetalmoney⁠email: chris at heavymetal.moneyContact Dan:email: dan at corepln.comhttps://www.corepln.com/dan-hineResources and Links:https://heavymetal.money/creditscores/Jurassic World: Rebirth trailerhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jan5CFWs9ic

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2652: J. Money from BudgetsAreSexy.com demystifies the complexities behind credit scores in "Six Secrets of a Credit Score." This insightful piece breaks down the essential components and strategies for optimizing your credit score, from understanding the impact of payment history to the nuances of credit utilization, offering invaluable advice for those looking to secure their financial future. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.budgetsaresexy.com/six-secrets-of-a-credit-score/ Quotes to ponder: "It's been a while since I've talked about credit scores (mainly because they kinda bore me), but they really ARE important to keep in mind." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2652: J. Money from BudgetsAreSexy.com demystifies the complexities behind credit scores in "Six Secrets of a Credit Score." This insightful piece breaks down the essential components and strategies for optimizing your credit score, from understanding the impact of payment history to the nuances of credit utilization, offering invaluable advice for those looking to secure their financial future. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.budgetsaresexy.com/six-secrets-of-a-credit-score/ Quotes to ponder: "It's been a while since I've talked about credit scores (mainly because they kinda bore me), but they really ARE important to keep in mind." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2652: J. Money from BudgetsAreSexy.com demystifies the complexities behind credit scores in "Six Secrets of a Credit Score." This insightful piece breaks down the essential components and strategies for optimizing your credit score, from understanding the impact of payment history to the nuances of credit utilization, offering invaluable advice for those looking to secure their financial future. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.budgetsaresexy.com/six-secrets-of-a-credit-score/ Quotes to ponder: "It's been a while since I've talked about credit scores (mainly because they kinda bore me), but they really ARE important to keep in mind." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike discusses credit scores and credit card statements. He explains the components of a credit score, including payment history, utilization, average credit length, new credit, and credit mix.Episode Time Stamps:00:00 Intro and the basics00:57 Components of a Credit Score02:21 Payment History and Utilization02:49 Average Credit Length and New Credit04:17 Credit Mix04:46 Understanding Credit Card Statements06:38 Payment Due Date and Interest07:34 Importance of Making Payments on Time08:33 Managing Credit Utilization09:28 Strategies for Low Credit Utilization12:22 Strategies for Average Credit Length13:44 Keeping Oldest Credit Card Open16:36 Improving Bad Credit20:28 Increasing and Decreasing Credit LimitsKeep Up With Daily Drop:Read the newsletter: https://www.dailydrop.com Join the Lounge: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dailydroplounge Check out our top cards: https://dailydrop.com/pages/our-top-credit-cards Follow along on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailydrop/ Hang out on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyDrop Prefer a video podcast? Head over here: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyDropPodcast

In this episode, we talk about foreclosure & the must-know items to be successful in note investing. Rick reveals the due diligence process that goes into analyzing a mortgage note in foreclosure. He discusses the importance of gathering information from the seller, payment history, and servicing notes. He also talks about the role of court records in determining how far along the foreclosure process is.Learn about the differences between Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy and why a borrower might file for each type. Lastly, they touch on how foreclosure can be delayed due to a bankruptcy filing and the concept of relief of stay.00:00 Intro01:20 Due Diligence Process For Analyzing a Note in Foreclosure1:46 - Gathering information from the seller2:01 - Questions to Ask the Seller2:55 - Payment History and Servicing Notes3:38 - Comparing Information for a Note in Foreclosure3:47 - Looking at Court Records4:01 - Accessing Court Records in Florida4:20 - Different Access Rules in Other States4:45 - Checking for bankruptcy filings on PACER6:00 - Reasons why someone might file for bankruptcy06:09 - Differences between Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy7:15 - How bankruptcy can delay a foreclosure7:31 - Relief of stay explainedFor more videos on mortgage notes & real estate investing SUBSCRIBE to our channel: https://pstac.co/subscribe_on_youtube

Learn the beginner's mistakes to avoid. Is setting up a real estate LLC even worth it? Learn how to build the right credit score for a mortgage loan, including why you actually don't want a score over 800. If a cash flowing property is so great, why would anyone sell it to you? I outline a myriad of reasons. Should you make a lowball offer to a real estate seller? Learn negotiation techniques. Earnest money procedures are covered. The real estate buying process is slow. From the time that you make the offer, it can often take over 30 days to close the deal. Once your offer is accepted, I recommend a professional third party inspection. It can cost you $300 to $500 for a single-family income property up to $1,000 for a fourplex inspection. I cover property appraisals and how they verify the quality of the bank's collateral. Learn how to get a good feel for your property manager and what their duties are.  I discuss the Management Agreement between you and your manager. Be sure to tell your insurance provider that this is a rental property, not your primary residence. A mobile notary meets you at your home, workplace, airport, or even a restaurant in order to complete the paper-and-ink closing process. This wraps up the deal. Get started with income property at: GREmarketplace.com. For free coaching to help get you started, contact our free Investment Coach, Naresh, at: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Resources mentioned: Show Notes: www.GetRichEducation.com/433 Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Analyze your RE portfolio at (use code “GRE” for 10% off): MyPropertyStats.com  Memphis property that cash flows from Day 1: www.MidSouthHomeBuyers.com I'd be grateful if you search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review” and do this for the show. Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free—text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith's personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Welcome to GRE! I'm your host Keith Weinhold, here to help BEGINNING Real Estate Investors Today.    The biggest beginner mistakes to avoid, when you make an offer - can you lowball a turnkey provider, and all those buyer steps like LLCs, mortgage pre-approval, inspection, appraisal, and closing. Today, on Get Rich Education. _____________________   Welcome to GRE. From Athens, Greece to Athens, Georgia and across 188 nations worldwide. The voice of REI since 2014.    This is Get Rich Education Podcast episode 433 - and this is your Beginner's Real Estate Investing Audio Guide. Hi, I'm your host Keith Weinhold.   We're talking about how to get into long-term buy & hold RE investing - and that's because it's the most generationally-proven way to build wealth.   First, let's talk about a couple of the biggest mistakes that real estate investors make - it's being invested in only one geographic market. Often, that's the market that they just happen to live in.    There is more risk with being in only one market than most realize, because you're now tied to the fortunes or misfortunes of just one area's economy.   Another substantial, common real estate investor mistake is that they continue to hold onto one - I'll call it - special - property in their portfolio that they usually need to get rid of - but they have either sentimental ties to it - or they just hold onto it for convenience, and do you know what that property is?   I'm actually talking about a specific property here.   It's the home that YOU YOU USED TO LIVE IN yourself. Well, what's wrong with renting out the home that you used to live in yourself?    You might still have the preferable owner-occupied financing locked in on that one - and afterall, that's a better rate than you could get on a non-owner-occupied rental.   The problem is that the property probably doesn't perform BEST as a rental.   But you might be clearing, say $600 per month by using your former primary residence as a rental today.    Look, for you, it's often about the cash flow - and yes, it is about the cash flow.    But there's something even more important than cash flow - that's because nearly any property will cash flow if the loan were paid off.   That's why it's really more specifically about the rent-to-price ratio of a property.   If you're renting out the home that you used to live in, and it wasn't strategically bought as a rental, if your rent-to-price ratio is 0.4%, meaning that for every $100K in value it has, you're only getting $400 of monthly rent income, then you're losing cash flow dollars every year - and every month.   Look, let's give a real life example of the .4% RV ratio. Say that you can get $2,000 rent out of that $500K property that you used to live in.    But instead, three $150K homes bought strategically as rentals can have a combined rent income of $3,000.    So it's either one $500K property at $2,000 of rent income. Or three $150K properties at $3,000 of rent income.    So you're losing $1,000 dollars of cash flow every month - by not buying and owning strategically in markets in the Midwest and South where the properties make sense as a RENTAL on the day that you buy it.   Your primary residence only made sense as a primary residence on the day that you bought it.    Now you can see that the only reason that you still own it, is because you defaulted and “fell” into it. Don't fall into things. Often, you want to be intentional.    You are a better investor when you're intentional rather than emotional.   It's even better for you now. Beyond your $1,000 of additional cash flow with some repositioning, now, with three properties instead of one - now you've also taken care of the first real estate investor mistake that I mentioned.   WITH three rentals rather than one, now you can be diversified across multiple markets.   Two birds are killed with one stone. Now with some re-positioning, you've increased your cash flow by $1,000, AND you're in multiple markets. One property isn't divisible.   And this $1,000 of monthly cash flow example is small. Of course, the differences can be greater than this.   We're talking about real estate investing for beginners today, so let me clearly guide you through step-by-step on just how you go about buying your first property - writing an offer, getting an independent third-party property inspection and vetting your Property Manager which is known as due diligence, then the appraisal, and onto closing and receiving cash flow from the tenant.   As you'll see, much of today's show pertains to any investment property at all.   But we're talking mostly about how to buy what are known as turnkey homes, especially homes outside your home market - as most of the best deals are not found where you live.   Turnkey means three basic things. #1- You buy a property that's either brand new construction or fully renovated. #2- A tenant is placed for you - and you get to approve them. And #3- the property is held under management for you from Day 1 - if you so choose.   Like they say, the best investors live where they want to live, invest where the numbers make sense.   Today's content is primarily geared toward United States real estate investors - but those that live outside the United States will benefit here too. You might want to buy a property in the US.   Here's a question that you might have - “How do I go about setting up an LLC - a Limited Liability Company - to hold my investment property in?”   I'll tell you - I don't think “How do I set up an LLC?” is the best question to ask.   The best question to ask is, “Should I set up an LLC?”    The three main reasons people set up an LLC are for either anonymity, tax purposes, or asset protection.   Now, if you know that you WANT to set up an LLC - I've done four episodes on that topic with Rich Dad Legal Advisor Garrett Sutton.   You can go to GetRichEducation.com, type “Garrett Sutton” in the search bar, and those four episode numbers will appear so that you can listen. He was just on the show with us 9 weeks ago on Episode 424.   But the reason that the question is, “Should I even SET up an LLC?” is because:   Setup of LLCs complicates your life. Maintaining a registered agent, Articles Of Incorporation, having separate accounts, tracking expenses with separate credit cards, paying annual fees for everything - depending on how many LLCs you have and how you structure your life - it can wear you out.   The second reason you should ask yourself, “Should I even set up an LLC?” is because you might not have many assets for a litigant to go after. Retirement accounts have certain protections already. Equity in a property could be low-hanging fruit for a plaintiff attorney if someone gets a judgment against you. But since the Return From Equity is always zero, what would you have much equity in a property anyway?   The third reason you should ask yourself, “Why should I even set up an LLC?” is that frivolous or slip-and-fall type of lawsuits are rare. Not only have I never been a party to one, I've never even heard of any investor friend or associate having one - and I talk to a lot of people. You probably haven't heard of one either.   Now, note that I'm not saying you can't get an LLC or shouldn't get one. I'm saying, prioritize those questions to yourself.   First, it's “Should I get one?”. If that's a definitive “yes”, only THEN ask: “How do I set one up?”   Why do you think you have to? Did some attorney use fear tactics to get you to?   If the result of the LLC's administrative overburden provides a greater reward in the form of asset protection, anonymity, or tax benefit - which is typically a flow-through taxation type anyway, you might then … get an LLC.   So, as a beginning real estate investor, understand that real estate is a credit-based asset - meaning it's usually bought with a loan.   So let's talk about getting your finances in order before you contact a lender or select an income property.   That begins with you having enough cash liquidated for a 20% down payment on the property - add about 4% for closing costs, depending on the state that you're buying your property in - and on the lowest-priced property that's still in a decent area of a low-cost city - which might be a $100,000 property …   24% of that then is about $24,000 that you'll need. You should have some extra on top of that as reserves.    Now, let's look at another part of your finances - your DTI - your debt-to-income ratio. It cannot exceed 43% to 45% - maybe up to 50% in some circumstances.    So if your monthly minimum debt payments - everywhere in your life - housing payment, minimum credit card payments, minimum car payment - if that sum is $5,000 and your gross monthly income is $10,000 - that's a 50% DTI. You can't exceed that.   Of course, before a bank is willing to loan you money, they want to have a reasonable assurance that you aren't weighed down with debt elsewhere because their fear factor goes up that they won't get paid back.   Next, let's talk about your credit score. We dedicated an entire episode to this back in Episode 54. If you can remember back that far, Philip Tirone was here with us and you learned more about credit scores that you probably ever thought you would …   … and he even went on to call the credit scoring system a total scam. He was quite opinionated - it was interesting and eye-opening, but ...   Playing within the scam here - as it might be.    There are many different credit scoring models, but the FICO Score - F-I-C-O - is a respected one that you're probably going to see your mortgage lender use.   It stands for Fair Isaac Company.   Their credit scoring range is 300 - the worst, up to 850. 850 is essentially a perfect score.   Importantly, 740 is the highest score that helps you here.    If you have a 782 or an 836, it doesn't help you qualify for the loan or get you a lower mortgage interest rate or anything else.    740 is where you're optimized.   Now, just a quick overview of FICO credit scoring ...   There are five primary ingredients that make up your credit score. In order of importance, they are your payment history, amounts owed, length of your credit history, new credit, and finally credit mix.  That first one, Payment History, is the most heavily weighted one. It's 35% of your score. As you might expect, the repayment of past debt is a major factor in the calculation of credit scores. It helps determine your future long-term payment behavior. Both revolving credit (i.e. credit cards) and installment loans (i.e. mortgage) are included in payment history calculations.  Although installment loans like mortgages take a bit more precedence over revolving credit - like credit cards.  This is why one of the best ways to improve or maintain a good score is to make consistent, on-time payments. The next way, your Amounts Owed – 30% This category is basically credit utilization or the percentage of available credit being used - or borrowed against. Credit score formulas “see” borrowers who constantly reach or exceed their credit limit as a potential risk. That is why it's a good idea to keep low credit card balances and not overextend your credit utilization ratio. So if you've got just a $1,000 balance on a credit card with a $10,000 credit limit, that's seen as a good ratio. You're staying well within your limits then.  The third FICO credit score ingredient is the Length of your Credit History – 15% This factor is based on the length of time all credit accounts have been open. It also includes the timeframe since an account's most recent transaction.  Newer credit users could have a more difficult time achieving a high score than those who have a long credit history. That's because if you have a longer credit history, FICO has more data on which to base their payment history. The fourth of five FICO ingredients is your “Credit Mix” – Now we're down to an ingredient only comprising 10% of your score. Credit mix just means that it helps your score if you have a combination of credit cards, retail accounts, installment loans, finance company accounts and mortgage loans.  Finally, “New Credit” makes up the last 10% of your FICO score. Don't open too many new credit accounts in a short period of time. That signifies a greater risk to lenders – and that's especially true for you if you're a borrower with a short credit history.  And you sure don't want to open up any new lines of credit, down the road when you're in the qualification process for buying a new property unless you check with your Mortgage Loan officer first. Now, those five factors have been weighted the same for quite a few years.  Knowing what factors make up your FICO® Credit Score can help you qualify for more loans and get better mortgage interest rates. That's the bottom line. This helps you get pre-qualifed or pre-approved with your Mortgage Lender. To get prequalified, you just need to provide some financial information to your mortgage lender, such as your income and the amount of savings and investments you have. Your lender will review this information and tell you how much they can lend you.    After pre-qualification, you can seek the higher-level status and that is getting pre-APPROVAL for credit. Pre-approval is better than pre-qualification.   If you think about it, it makes sense. Qualifying for anything in life is not as good as getting approved for something - I suppose.   Pre-approval involves providing your more detailed financial documents - like W-2 statements, paycheck stubs, bank account statements, and your previous two years tax returns. This way, your lender can VERIFY your financial status and credit.   Now that you're pre-approved with a lender, you can focus on the market and property that you're interested in.   RidgeLendingGroup.com is the mortgage lender that we recommend most often because they SPECIALIZE in income property. They don't have any seasoning requirements.   Seasoning means that the person selling YOU the property needs to have held onto it for a certain length of time - or the lender won't finance the property for you.   While you're in the pre-approval process, you can be learning about a cash-flowing investment market.    You want to pick a geographic metro market that typically has low-cost properties, and high rent incomes in proportion to those low costs.    In fact, the market is more important than the property. Because your income comes from your tenant, and your tenant's income comes from a job.   So you typically don't want to own much property in a town with 12,000 people that's in an outlying area - not part of a greater metro - where 1/3rd of the employment is tied to one tungsten factory or even one semiconductor manufacturer.   Because now, too much of your income stream is tied to just one industry.   If the tungsten industry goes down, so goes your tenant base.   You also don't want to buy slummy property. Those tenants often don't pay the rent. You also don't want to buy much above an area's median-priced home, because the numbers don't work out.   So you want that working class housing that's just below the median price point for the area.   If you're not already confident about that and familiar with the right provider ...    We have information on the right market, with the right provider, with properties - and they're typically in the MidWest and South - at GREmarketplace.com   So read a market report there. That's good, pointed information.   Most investors are interested in a property for the production of cash flow. That's the margin by which your monthly rent income exceeds all monthly expenses.   Rent income minus expenses should be a positive number.   So that's your monthly rent minus VIMTUM. V-I-M-T-U-M.    Vacancy, Insurance, Maintenance, Taxes, Utilities, and Management.   I like easy ways to remember things and VIMTUM is an easy way to remember.   So, you're listening to the Beginner's Real Estate Investing Audio Guide here as a regular episode of the GRE Podcast.   If you're not a beginner & you're still listening, it's either a good review and you might even be learning some new things along the way yourself.    Including, should you ever lowball a turnkey provider and a negotiation approach that I have for that - in a few minutes.    But first, one reasonable beginner question is ...     “Now why would someone would want to sell me a cash-flowing property in the first place?    Why would someone - like a turnkey provider - why would they sell me a good thing that pays them every month that they could continue to hold onto for cash flow?   If a property pays someone every month while they hold onto it - why in the heck would they sell it to me?   OK, some seller out there has a golden goose that lays a golden egg every month, so why in the world would they give me an opportunity to buy the goose?   Well, there are just so many reasons for selling cash-flowing property - yes, a ton of reasons for selling even a young, healthy goose that lays golden eggs every month & is expected to so for years.   Well, a turnkey provider runs out of money too. They can't buy all the properties themselves.    They'd prefer a lump sum payout when they sell this property, because their business model is to go pay all cash for another distressed property that they can fix up.   And if you think that they snatched up the good ones themselves a while ago - yeah, they probably did do some of that.   In fact - I WANT them to have snatched up some good properties from their own market earlier. It shows me that they believe in what they sell. If they didn't buy what they were selling themselves, I'd actually be MORE concerned.   Now, other reasons that the - I guess general public seller might want to sell you a property is ...   One reason is moving. Say that a family in City A owns a few mom-and-pop rental homes that they self-manage and they're moving to City B in another state, they'll often sell their income properties.   Some people want to self-manage their property (often because they never explored their best-and-highest use, but anyway) & if they have to move to City B, they'll sell the property rather than try to find a Property Manager in City A.    Another reason people sell cash-flowing property is that - even if someone is not moving, that person might be tired of the self-management hassle - but yet they don't try professional management - because that person has the DIYer mentality - that soooo common do-it-yourself mindset.   OK, most people just don't take a strategic approach to real estate investing like you are by listening to this.   Other reasons for people selling cash-flowing property are death, marriage, divorce, and all kinds of either joyous or tragic life milestones.   If a husband-and-wife own rental properties but running & managing them was kind of the husband's thing & the husband dies … the wife doesn't know how to run the properties & she's likely to sell rather than hire a Property Manager.   People may sell their cash-flowing property in case of all kinds of emergencies - medical and otherwise - because they may need a quick lump of cash - instead of the steady stream of cash flow over time that just won't work for them in their new situation.   OK, most of those situations involve some sort of external life change for property sellers - a lot of them tragic.   Well - here's a personal one for you...    A few years ago, I sold two cash-flowing apartment buildings at the same time - well, those sales actually closed on consecutive days - so nearly the same time.   Both of those cash-flowing apartment buildings that I sold were 100% occupied with tenants, I had competent management in place, and there were no deferred maintenance issues with the buildings.   You want to know my reason for selling two nice golden apartment gooses that were seasoned and steadily laying some nice golden eggs?   OK...can you guess why?   Alright, fortunately I didn't have any distress or emergency in my life.   ...oh, and also, I wanted to sell them fast too, I couldn't let these two cash-flowing apartment buildings linger on the market for a while. I really wanted to get rid of them.   I had no distress like those situations I mentioned earlier.   So can you guess why I wanted to sell these long-producing golden gooses in a good job growth market that produced nice cash flow, nice golden eggs?   I'll tell you why.   That's because I knew I could 1031 Exchange those two gooses for two even larger gooses. Now I won't get into the 1031 here on a beginner episode.    But I replaced the two smaller apartment buildings with two larger apartment buildings that would produce even larger eggs if I did it with a quick timeline - and I could defer any tax on my profitable gain.    I found - I guess - two very fertile egg producers that were going to produce even more cash flow over time.   So...I think you get the message here. To the buyers of my smaller apartment buildings, I appeared as a very motivated seller of cash-flowing property, even though I had no external stress in my life.    It was due to internal reasons that I wanted to sell...and it's the internal drive to expand my income.    No shrinking thinking here at Get Rich Education. We are growing our means.   Now, when you've found a cash-flowing property that you want to buy, should you make a lowball offer to a turnkey provider? My definition of lowball here, is, a 10% discount.    We'll say, that a provider is offering a property for $120,000 - then you'd make the offer for 10% less, which is $108,000. That's a lowball.   My answer is ...    No. That's not going to work. In almost every instance, that's too much of a discount and it's going to eat their margin too much.    Depending on how it's presented, a seller might even be less motivated to work with you if they get a lowball offer.    This company has a business to run and with a turnkey property, you're typically paying for the convenience. You leveraged their systems of them delivering this product to you that's already renovated, rehabilitated, tenanted, and under management.    Now, can you can knock off $1K-$2K? And say, offer the seller then - $118K or $119K for the $120,000 property. Yeah, that might work.    It sure wouldn't be deemed some unreasonable request. But it's good to at least provide a reason - some rationale - in asking for the discount.   Let me give you some perspective on this negotiation too.    For every $1,000 less in a mortgage loan that you take out, how much do you think that saves you in a monthly payment? Did you ever figure out how much that saves you?   Well, at a 5% interest rate on a 30-year loan, reducing your mortgage loan amount by $1,000 saves you … $5. Five bucks in a reduced payment.   For more perspective, keep in mind too, that once the seller accepts your offer - it's only the first part of the negotiation.   Later, it's a negotiation with the inspection. We'll discuss how to navigate THAT shortly.   I'm Keith Weinhold. You're listening to the Audio Beginner's Guide to Real Estate Investing, here on Get Rich Education. ________________ ***AD RESOURCES***    ________________ Welcome back to GRE Podcast 433. This is your Audio Beginner's Guide to Real Estate Investing. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold and we're talking about buying an income-producing property, especially…   …a TURNKEY property - which just means that it's already renovated, tenanted, and under management with a tenant on the day that you buy it.    Now, once your offer is accepted by the seller, I want to give you - really just a brief outline of what to expect next.    This isn't intended to give you every step in exhaustive detail, but this is generally what comes next for United States real estate purchases, and custom varies somewhat from state-to-state.   So with that in mind, once the turnkey provider or seller accepts your purchase offer...   You need to send in your earnest money. Earnest money is not the down payment. It's a smaller amount that shows good faith that you're serious about your offer.    It's often an amount of $5,000 or less and it shows the seller that you're serious enough about buying the property that the seller has the confidence to take their property OFF the market and not show it to anyone else.   The seller should give you instructions on how to place your Earnest Money.    Now remember, your earnest money deposit is not going directly TO the seller, it is going to a third-party escrow account, and it is refundable to you in accordance with the terms of the contract that you signed.   Your contract should have an estimated closing date in there. I want to emphasize that the key word there is “estimated”.    While it is important that all parties work towards closing by this date, between you and me - let's just be realistic - the reality is that many transactions get delayed beyond the closing date in the contract for a variety of reasons on the seller side, sometimes having to do with construction or renovation delays.    If this happens, it is nothing to be worried about, just remain in touch with the seller and you can simply sign a contract extension if needed when the time comes.   As you are financing your property, be sure to keep getting your lender anything that they ask you for up so that they can keep processing your loan.    As your closing gets near, they will probably ask you for some updated information and have some final stipulations from the underwriter, so just remain in close touch with your lender and try to provide them what they need as swiftly as you can.   During most of this time where you're under contract & even before you're in-contract to buy the property, most of your relationship with your lender and seller is just sitting around, waiting for the next stage.    Some days, frankly you're thinking, “When will they reply to my e-mail?” OK, sometimes, RE moves slower than glaciers.   Once construction/renovation is completed on your property, I suggest that you order a professional third-party home inspection before closing.    As the buyer, this is at your expense, but the home inspection is cheap insurance for you and it is an important part of your due diligence. It might cost you about $300-$500 for a single-family turnkey income property.   A four-plex inspection might cost up toward $800 or $1,000.   When seeking an inspector - seek ASHI certification - that is American Society of Home Inspectors.   You're looking for an inspector with a good reputation, licensed and bonded. It is good to look for a level of experience as well. The choice is really yours as the Buyer.   Your inspector points out deficiencies in what I'll break into a few categories.    #1 is Major concerns – these are significantly defective, safety issues that require immediate repair. Often times, those things absolutely MUST be done in order for your lender to even finance the property so the seller is going to do those things for you. That might be something like adding a railing to a porch.   The second category are recommended repairs – So they're recommended but not required. That might be adding some extra insulation in the attic.    The third category is “well, it would be NICE if it were done” - like a kitchen cabinet door that's a little loose and doesn't close snugly.   When you get your home inspection report back because the inspector has compiled their findings, the key to remember is that the inspector will ALWAYS return a (usually long) list of items that they recommend be corrected prior to closing.    Now, this even happens on new construction, so expect some findings.   I swear, even on a perfect, unblemished home it seems like the inspector would say that the bushes have to be trimmed or something. Ha!   And remember, you are not closing on the property in the condition it was inspected. Rather, the inspection is just part of the process on the path to getting the property up to its final condition.    Then you and the seller agree on what will be fixed (at the SELLER'S expense (not your expense), and verified to your satisfaction), prior to closing.    The seller is anticipating that they will need to make some final repairs (at their own expense) after they get the inspection repair request from you - that your inspector just compiled for you. This is all part of the normal process.   Of course, you can get in a car or hop on a plane and visit the turnkey property yourself and walk the property with your inspector, but I'd say fewer than 10% of turnkey buyers do this. I have never done this on an out-of-state property.   But going to see the property in person is never a BAD idea.   Today, it's easier than ever for an inspector or provider to e-mail you a property video. The report that you get from your Home Inspector after he visited the home will have lots of photos and details.   Typically, purchase offers are contingent on a home inspection of the property to check for signs of structural damage or things that may need fixing.  This contingency protects you by giving you a chance to renegotiate your offer or withdraw it without penalty if the inspection reveals significant material damage. You are protected. Once the seller makes any needed repairs that the third-party inspector found, I suggest having a re-inspection done by that same inspector. This gives you the chance to confirm that any agreed-upon repairs have indeed been made. You might spend another $100+ on this re-inspection. Now, if the original inspection showed that a leaky faucet needed to be replaced, and the seller said they'd do it, and the re-inspection finds that that work wasn't done as promised, then any FURTHER re-inspection costs are often a cost borne by the seller. Which seems pretty fair - they said they'd do work - and the re-inspection that you paid for confirmed that it hadn't been done in this case. Now, back to the negotiation. If you asked for a reduced Purchase Price, that could lean away from you asking for too much in the inspection.   How do I like to play it? Often times, I make a full price offer for the property - and I might even let the seller know at that time that I'd like to give you your price - it's a full $120,000 in this case - and since you got your price, I'd like my terms.   My terms are - that I'm more bold in what I request the seller to do from the inspection findings.  Maybe I will ask them to add that extra insulation in the attic as one of those “Recommended buy not Required For Financing” items - or replace a window pane that had condensation inside it.   Then, what's my justification for asking the seller for that. It's that I'm paying your full price. Again, financing an extra $1,000 only costs me $5 per month.   Now, let's talk about the property appraisal.    The appraisal is a tool that the bank uses to verify the quality of their collateral.    Because in your loan paperwork, at closing, the bank will basically tell you that if you don't make your monthly payments, you'll be foreclosed upon and the bank will take back the property - that's their collateral.   So they want to make sure that the property seems to be worth as much or more than you're in contract for - this $120,000 in our example.   Your lender is the one that orders the property appraisal, not you. In about 90% of U.S. states, you as the buyer pay for the appraisal. It costs about $500.    The appraiser is a member of a third-party company and is not directly associated with the lender. It wasn't always that way.    In fact, one factor that led to the housing downturn of 2007 in the Great Recession is that some lenders & appraisers were “in cahoots”. Haha! That can't happen anymore.    BTW, the appraisal and some of these other steps are all part of your closing costs. All part of that … about 4% of the property purchase price.   The appraisal is typically done by a certified appraiser physically visiting the home - and these people always seemingly have a tape measure with them.   The appraiser checks out the premises and their job is to use market comparables to make sure that the lender has adequate collateral in case you, the borrower, default.   OK, the bank doesn't want to lend out more than the property is worth or else they could find themselves underwater if the borrower defaults. The appraisal protects against this.   And don't confuse this appraisal with an assessment. An assessment is something that a county or municipality uses the measure the amount of property taxes that are paid. It's really unrelated to this appraisal.   One interesting thing that's related to the appraisal and the bank giving you the loan for 80% of the property is that the lender NEVER requires that you see the property in person.   Think about what that means. The bank never requires you to see the property in-person, yet they're willing to loan you up to 80% of the value.   Even the bank knows that it's not important for you to personally see the property - something that they're willing to put their money behind.   Now, when it comes to finding properties and markets and teams, our listeners & followers encouraged us to set up a marketplace for them for finding the properties.   We've done that for you at GREmarketplace.com. And knowing that Property Management is the glue that makes your property stick together, we - and it's Aundrea here at GRE that does it - where you find your properties at GRE Marketplace, Aundrea also interviews the property manage in each market for you so that you can get a good feel and vibe about them.   Most any provider is happy to do a PM Zoom chat or phone call with you too.   Now, just because a property is branded “turnkey” by a company, doesn't mean that you can dismiss doing your due diligence. Turnkey can be a great system, but there's nothing magical about that word alone.   Don't overlook developing a good feeling about your Property Manager, because this is the one long-term relationship that you expect to have. I just can't emphasize that enough. Your Manager is one of your key team members.   They'll tell you the character of the current tenant that's currently in the home. Find out how the manager is going to pay you. Feel them out, know what your communication flow is going to be like.    If they're part of the same turnkey company, a good manager should also connect you with whoever renovated your turnkey property in case you have some questions for them.   Now, notice that I haven't mentioned a real estate agent. Most turnkey providers work in a direct model so that you don't have to go through agents. That's one way that GRE Marketplace providers keep the price down for you.   You must sign a written Management Agreement with your Property Manager.    What the MA does is that it gives the manager the authority to manage your property for you, manage tenant relations for you, the MA will state their fees, and you'll have your contact information in that agreement.   There are typically two fees - a leasing fee and a management fee.   A leasing fee is where you'll spend ½ month's rent to one month's rent amount when the Manager screens a new tenant. So hopefully that only happens every 1 or 2 or even 5 years if you're lucky.    Yes, you can typically approve or reject their selected prospective tenant. You are going to be the owner of the property afterall.   A management fee is often 8-10% of one month's rent income - and that's what you pay monthly - ongoing.   You can sign a Management Agreement with the property provider if they have management integrated in-house. If not, you can lean on your provider for some management recommendations.   Now, there's one blank to fill in on your Management Agreement - it's a dollar amount up to which the manager can pay for expenses that come up - against your account - without contacting you.    For example, if the number $500 is written in there, that means that if a maintenance or repair expense on your property exceeds $500, they must contact you prior to incurring that expense.   You get to choose that dollar limit. As a beginning real estate investor, go with a lower figure.    Then as you get comfortable or you don't want to be bothered about the property as much, you can increase that dollar limit in which they need to contract you about approving maintenance or repairs.   Basically, if there's something that has to do with the property & you don't want to deal with it, then make sure it's written in the Management Agreement that the manager will perform it.   Typically, it's going to say that the manager will collect rent, handle tenant relations, respond to repair requests, send you the rent, keep your ledger of income & expenses on the property, post legal notices if a tenant is paying the rent late, and sooo many other associated duties that I personally don't want to deal with.    Hey, I just want to live my life & keep this investment nearly passive.   Get that Management Agreement done - fully executed - signed by both you & the Manager BEFORE you close on the property.    Before you close, you can buy property insurance from any provider you choose.    Your turnkey provider is often happy to recommend some providers that their other clients have used in this market, or you can just Google and find your own.    Be sure to let the insurance provider know that this is a rental property (not a primary residence where you live and not a second home).    Most turnkey buyers purchase both hazard and liability insurance as part of their policy. Like any other insurance policy, you will have choices about deductibles & monthly payments, and coverage amounts.    If you are financing your property, your lender will most likely be able to combine your property taxes and insurance into your monthly payment, so you have one monthly payment for principal, interest, taxes and insurance (PITI) … much like you would on your primary residence.   The financing process typically takes about 30 days from the time you submit your EM.    Remember that YOU are a factor in how fast your property closes. If that lender needs another document, give it to them pretty promptly.   When you've finalized your due diligence, and verified that the seller has made all the agreed upon repairs from the home inspection report, you will be ready to close.    You likely live in a different state than the property and will close remotely. The title company (or its a closing attorney in some states) will prepare your closing documents - including your loan docs...    ...and can arrange for a mobile notary to meet you with the docs wherever you choose (your home, your office, your local coffee shop, etc.) so you can sign the docs in front of a notary who will then overnight the docs back to the Title Company so the transaction can fund.   Yep, you can do the ink-and-paper thing with a mobile notary at your local Starbucks.   Your lender will arrange for a title company to handle all of the paperwork and make sure that the seller is the rightful owner of the house that you are buying. That's part of what they do for you.   It may seem like the closing process is a lot of work, but you'll really spend most of the time waiting. Most of the time, you'll just be sitting on your hands, waiting for someone else involved in the transaction to come through.    So find something enjoyable to occupy your time and distract you while you wait, and feel secure in the knowledge that you've done your research and know how to make your closing process go smoothly.   When you complete that closing with the mobile notary - I've done these closings at my home's dining room table, or even in my employer's conference room back when I used to have a day job - then, hey!    You need to congratulate yourself on adding another income property to your portfolio.   You know, the good news is that of all of these stages we've discussed - the longest stage of them all is your ownership of the property. You Own & Collect the cash flow.   And hey, this isn't reason enough alone - but it's kinda cool that you own property in TN and FL and IN.  You own part of each one of those states. You're like a property collector!   And with each new turnkey property you buy, you might have just increased your mostly passive cash flow by $211 per month or $118 per month or whatever it is.   If you can swing it, it can be more efficient timewise for you to buy more than one property at a time.   As you buy more income properties, it not only gets easier because you know the process, but you often get quantity discounts.   For example, a management company might charge you a 9% management fee on your first three properties, but once you own four or more, they might charge you 8% on all four rather than 9%.   Insurance companies often have similar discounts for you….so you may very well get a little more profitable as you buy more property.   I've been actively investing in real estate since 2002 and just within the steps of ACQUIRING a property, like I carefully discussed today, some incremental half-step will come up in the process that I haven't mentioned here - like signing a Lead Paint Disclosure Form.   So, you don't need to commit all of this stuff to memory.   Now, something that novice real estate investors say sometimes is something like: “I would only buy an income property that I would live in myself.”    I contend that that is an awful criterion upon which to found strategic fundamentals on purchasing an income property.   Once one filters property that way, they have let their emotions trump facts.    If the fact that a clean, safe, affordable, and functional property has a good occupancy rate in a sound employment market, decent ENOUGH neighborhood, and the numbers make sense - that's more important.   OK, you aren't living there yourself so it's not a sound criterion.   Shoot, if I moved into any income property that I own, my lifestyle would take a substantial hit. Yet I'm not a slumlord - I provide housing that's clean, safe, affordable and functional.   But they're not replete with fantastic amenities, it does not have Corinthian architecture with alabaster columns - OK - but I know there's a demographic for my rental property type that demands this responsible-but-no-frills housing over time.   It's about asking yourself a better question, like, “Will this property secure an income stream?”    Alright, would you rather have your property look “cute as a button” - or secure an income stream? I went deep on that topic just three weeks ago here on the show.   OK, we're investors here.   Some think that in today's electronic age, you should be able to complete a property purchase from the time you write an offer until you close on a property in the same-day.    Well, that's certainly not true. As you witnessed, physical things need to take place because you're buying a real, physical asset.   We've been talking today about how you buy an income property - just simply that - especially as it pertains to buying an out-of-state turnkey income property - from the time that you get a property under contract and submit the earnest money to escrow all the way to closing.   ...because that's how to generate passive income, which in turn, creates a rich life for you.   Again, this isn't an all-encompassing guide today with EVERY little detail. But we've hit the major milestones in the process & more.   You've got a good general guide on the income property-buying structure.    You might have learned something about prioritization - perhaps LLCs matter less than you thought and a communicative Property Manager matters more than you thought.   Today's show has the type of content that will be about as relevant 5 years from now as it does today.    Now, today is also evidence that real estate does not have the liquidity that some other investments do. It takes longer to get in & get out.   However, that low liquidity actually contributes to relative price stability in real estate. OK, there's no panic selling in real estate.   Maybe the most important thing for you to keep in mind is that...   You cannot make any money from the property that you don't own.   Your future depends on what you do today.   To “know” something and not “do” something is to really not know something.   The most important thing you can do is act...because you cannot make any money from the property that you don't own.   But if you're new to real estate investing & know that you need to “Start small but think big”, otherwise, all this knowledge really won't move the meter in helping you live an amazing life like RE can, in the past 1-2 years, we hired an in-house coach, who is completely free for you to use.   If you're still a little unsure or want some guidance, lean on our trusted source, Naresh at GREmarketplace.com/Coach   He is an expert at helping you along - totally free to you - again at GetRichEducation.com/Coach   It's almost hard to express how much value this gives you & makes it easy. I wish something like this existed when I started out.   There would be nothing worse than for me to share today's knowledge with you - then not let you know where to go to act upon that knowledge.     So if you're ready to get started - connect directly with market & properties at our Marketplace - at GREmarketplace.com   For a little more help, personal and one-on-one with our experienced in-house coach, start at GREmarketplace.com/Coach    Both resources are free   It's been my pleasure to bring you your Beginner's Real Estate Investing Audio Guide today.   Next week, I we'll discuss one particular geographic market that we never have before - and you probably never thought we would.   For properties, start at GREmarketplace.com For coaching, GREmarketplace.com/Coach   Until next week, I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Don't Quit Your Daydream! 

How much do you know about some basic finance terms and concepts? Test your knowledge with this Money Tip Tuesday financial quiz.   Links: Learn more about APR Listen to our Calculating Your Net Worth Money Tip Tuesday episode Freddie Mac information about credit scores Podcast episodes on credit: What the Heck is Credit and Why is it Important?  Strategies to Build Your Credit Listen to our Starting Your Emergency Fund Money Tip Tuesday episode  Follow our podcast Facebook, Instagram and Twitter Transcript: Welcome to Money Tip Tuesday from the Making Money Personal podcast.  How much do you know about some basic finance terms and concepts? Test your knowledge with this Money Tip Tuesday financial quiz.   Think you're up for the challenge? Give it a shot and see how well you do!   Good luck and let's begin!    Question 1: What does APR stand for?   APR stands for Annual Percentage Rate.   Investopedia defines APR as “the yearly interest generated by a sum that's charged to borrowers or paid to investors.” If you borrow money from a lender, you'll be charged interest on your payments. The APR tells you the percentage rate that you can expect to pay over a one-year period. In many types of loans, the rate and the APR are the same, but other times they can differ due to additional fees or charges associated with the loan.  Next time you're rate shopping, take note of not only the interest rate you'll pay, but that APR as well.     Question 2: Net worth is calculated by subtracting your debts from your what?   Net worth is calculated by subtracting all your debts (or liabilities) from your assets.   Assets are things you own that have value. Things like investments, cash and savings accounts, collectibles and jewelry are considered assets. On the flip side, your debts are everything that you owe money on. Things like your mortgage, auto loan, and credit card balances are all considered debts. When you calculate your net worth, you subtract the total number of your debts from the total number of your assets.   If you're interested in learning more about how to calculate your net worth, we have a Money Tip Tuesday episode that walks you through the steps on how to do it.     Question 3: If you want a healthy credit score, you should keep your debt to credit ratio below what percentage?  A) 80%  B) 30%  C) 50%  Answer: B) 30%  Your debt to credit ratio is used to describe how close you come to reaching your credit limit. A 100% debt to credit ratio means you've borrowed 100% of your credit line and essentially maxed out your card. This does not look good for your credit.   If you want to maintain a healthy credit score, you should aim to keep your debt to credit ratio at 30% or below. For example, if you have a $10,000 credit limit, you should be keeping your charges at or below the $3,000 amount.     Question 4: What are the 5 main factors that add up to make your credit score?   According to Freddi Mac, the main factors are: Payment History, Amounts you Owe, Length of Credit History, Credit Inquiries, and Types of Credit You Use.  These are all factors used to determine your credit score. Each carries a different weight so some are more important than others.   If you're trying to find ways to boost your credit score you can look at these factors. Pay attention to each one and how they can affect your personal credit history.   For more information about credit, you can listen to our prior episodes, What the Heck is Credit, and Strategies to Build Credit.    Question 5: How many months' worth should you have saved in an account for a healthy emergency fund? A) 1-2  B) 10-12  C) 3-6  Answer: C) 3-6 months  Your emergency fund is an account of money that you have set aside for emergency purchases. You should aim to have 3-6 months' worth of expenses set aside in this account in case something happens. For example, if your living expenses are around $5,000 a month, a healthy emergency fund would have $15,000 – $30,000 saved in it.  Having an emergency fund is an important financial goal to meet because it provides a lot of flexibility and assurance if life brings about unexpected challenges.   If you don't have an emergency fund yet, it's a good idea to start one. If you can't save the full 3-6 months right away, don't worry. Just start saving something and make that 3-6 months your next financial goal to meet.   This wraps up our quick financial quiz.   How did you do? Let us know on social media!   If there are any other tips or topics you would like us to cover, let us know at tcupodcast@trianglecu.org.  Like and follow our Making Money Personal FB, IG and Twitter pages and look for our sponsor, Triangle Credit Union on social media to share your thoughts.   Thanks for listening to today's Money Tip Tuesday and be sure to check out our other tips and episodes on the Making Money Personal podcast.   Have a great day! 

Are you in dire need of creating your own personalized “BLUEPRINT” Call me at 516-600-0127. Lets Create your BLUEPRINT NOW.

Whether it's missed bill payments or impulsive spending, ADHD makes managing money more challenging, which, if we're not careful, can lead to low credit scores. The good news is you can improve your credit score and keep it in a safe zone by following a few helpful tips.You Are More Than a NumberIn the eyes of the financial world, your financial reliability boils down to a three-digit number, ranging between 300 to 850, known as your credit score. Lenders use that number to judge you on your creditworthiness. The better your number, the better interest rates you'll be able to secure for things like car loans, credit cards, and mortgages.Check Your Credit History RegularlyCredit bureau companies like Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, collect information from various lenders to create your credit history report. The fewer blemishes on your account, the better your score.It's good practice to check your credit report for errors and verify no one has opened accounts in your name. The site annualcreditreport.com provides a limited number of reports each year. You can also sign up with Credit Karma for their free service, which alerts you when changes happen to your credit history. The Five Credit Score FactorsA credit score is made up of:Payment History - 35%Amounts owed  - 30%Length of credit history - 15%New credit accounts - 10%Types of credit in use - 10%Avoid these bad credit behaviorsMinimum payments. Only making minimum payments on credit card debt is an uphill climb, and you will see very little progress in paying off debtMissing Payments. Nowadays, there's no excuse to miss a payment, especially for those with ADHD. It only takes a few minutes to set up an automatic payment cycleCash advances. There's no scenario where a cash advance is a good idea. It will immediately start accruing interest, and there's usually a fee tied to itMaxing out your cards. Maxing out your credit cards means using up all of your available credit, which is one of the main things that make up credit scoresClosing Credit Card Accounts. Closing a card adversely affects your score by raising your credit utilization and decreasing your amount of available credit. Cut up the card or put it somewhere you won't use it, and remove the card information from all online shopping websitesWays to Improve Your Credit ScoreThe two most essential things when improving your credit score are payment history and credit utilization. Remember, 35% of your score is made up of your payment history, so a long list of missing or late payments on your credit report will be a huge red flag. This is where setting up automatic payments will help.If you have a lot of debt and have maxed out credit cards, you need to establish a debt payment plan which I covered in "Credit Cards and ADHD go Together Like Forks and Power Outlets."  Using the Snowball Method or Avalanche Method will help you establish a debt payment plan to aggressively pay off debt, which will improve your credit score.We covered a lot of information today. Remember the big picture and that you're doing this for your future. You'll have more freedom and security, a more vibrant life, and be able to wake up feeling less stressed about money. Work with me:Check out my ADHD Planning & Coaching service.Helping ADHD'erHelping ADHD'ers unleash their financial potential through planning and coaching.DeWittCM.com/adhd to book free discovery session

In this episode I share Five simple steps on how to fix your own credit. 6 Factors that effect Your credit score:1. Payment History - 35%2. Credit Usage - 30%3. Average Age of Credit - 15%4. Credit Mix - 10%5. Credit Inquires - 10%6. Derogatory Remarks - BonusFree Annual Credit Report: https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.actionTransunion Freed Credit Report: https://www.transunion.com/annual-credit-report5 Factors that effect your credit score: https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education/score-basics/what-affects-your-credit-scores/

Credit Score Explained in detail along with how to improve your credit score and get your credit card to 800 credit score. Credit Score tips for beginners and how to use a credit card wisely. Why Free Credit Score or Vantage score is not good and why FICO Score is better than free credit score, Which credit bureau should you check your credit score at? Perfect Credit can be achieved. If you are wondering what is credit score and how is it affected with FICO score or where to check your fico score is it from Experian or Equifax or Transunion Credit Bureaus. Which is the best place to look for the credit score or the FICO score is important or Vantage points. Why Credit Karma Score is not your accurate score? What is the difference between vantage score and fico score? Credit Card for beginners and How credit cards work? How is Equifax credit report different from Experian Credit report or different from Transunion Credit report. How to check which credit bureaus your bank will check for your credit report for the loan/car lease or credit card application/limit. Credit Score Vs Fico Score? Free Credit Score Vs Paid Credit Score? Credit Utilization is a vital part and the most variable part for your credit report as it constitutes 30% of the total credit score. Benefits of having great credit: 1. Better interest rates whenever you borrow money from the bank which can lead to you saving THOUSANDS of dollars. 2. Ability to obtain a car lease/loan 3. Ability to get a house 3 Different Credit Scores/Bureaus (Each calculates your score based on what is reported to them) 1. Experian (Best Bureau) - Every bank checks Experian Credit Report 2. Equifax 3. Transunion 2 Different Types of Scores 1. Vantage 2. FICO FICO is better than a vantage score. Vantage is found on credit karma and other places where you can get your score for FREE. *NEVER TRUST FREE CREDIT SCORES* 5 Factors That Make up your score #1 - Payment History - 35% #2 - Credit Utilization - 30% #3- Length of Credit History - 15% (The longer you have been burrowing the better. Picture when you go to a bar and the bartender knows you and will let you run up a tab because they know you're good for it, the same concept with credit history) #4 - Types of Credit - 10% (Loans/Car Leases/Credit Cards/Mortgage. The more diverse, the better) #5 - New Credit - 10% --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ecommerce-university/support

Build your credit score as a beginner in 2021 with no credit history with these steps in the video. tradelines to boost your credit score are just some steps away. Sites you can get credit lines approved IMMEDIATELY My Jewler's Club - https://www.myjewelersclub.com/credit-application/cart-notice/ AG Jewelers - https://www.agjewelrydesign.com/how-it-works/ Credit Score Explained in detail along with how to improve your credit score and get your credit card to 800 credit score. Credit Score tips for beginners and how to use a credit card wisely. Why Free Credit Score or Vantage score is not good and why FICO Score is better than free credit score, Which credit bureau should you check your credit score at? Perfect Credit can be achieved. Credit Plug Get instantly approved for a $10K credit line 1 . This overall adds more credit to your file and will give you an overall higher credit limit on your file. 2 . These are super important because you will be INSTANTLY approved and you will get credit lines added to your file. Be sure to add an authorized user for your credit card: Make sure you get added to someone's authorized user who qualifies this: 1. They never miss payments 2. Someone who is SUPER TRUSTWORTHY 3. Have 0-1% credit utilization If you are wondering what is credit score and how is it affected with FICO score or where to check your fico score is it from Experian or Equifax or Transunion Credit Bureaus. Which is the best place to look for the credit score or the FICO score is important or Vantage points. cpn Benefits of having great credit: 1. Better interest rates whenever you borrow money from the bank which can lead to you saving THOUSANDS of dollars. 2. Ability to obtain a car lease/loan 3. Ability to get a house *NEVER TRUST FREE CREDIT SCORES* 5 Factors That Make up your score #1 - Payment History - 35% #2 - Credit Utilization - 30% #3- Length of Credit History - 15% (The longer you have been burrowing the better. Picture when you go to a bar and the bartender knows you and will let you run up a tab because they know you're good for it, the same concept with credit history) #4 - Types of Credit - 10% (Loans/Car Leases/Credit Cards/Mortgage. The more diverse, the better) #5 - New Credit - 10% --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ecommerce-university/support

Did you know that Improving your credit score by just a few points could save you hundreds of dollars a year? It's true. Your credit score tells lenders three things:whetherto lend to you; howmuchto lend to you; and at whatinterest rate. Neile Simon joins Rob West today with tips to improve your credit score. Neile Simon is a Certified Credit Counselor withChristian Credit Counselors. CREDIT SCORE DETERMINING FACTORS The following factors will determine your credit score: ●Payment History: 35%.Paying your bills is hands-down the most important factor. ●Credit Utilization: 30%.Try to keep your credit balances below 30% of your total available credit. ●Length of Credit History: 15%.The longer your track record, the better. ●New Credit: 10%.When you apply for new credit, inquiries remain on your credit report for two years. FICO Scores only consider inquiries from the last 12 months. (source: myfico.com) ●Types of Credit:10%. Paying on-time on a variety of different types of loans can help, brut is by no means the most important factor. THE IMPORTANCE OF A STRONG CREDIT SCORE Your credit score can affect numerous things, such as: ●Your credit score could affect your ability to rent a home or apartment ●Prospective employers may check your credit score to determine how responsible you are. ●Those with poor credit may have to pay large deposits to hook up utilities are open a non-prepaid cell phone account. ●Your credit can also impact your ability to start a business or take advantage of other opportunities. HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CREDIT SCORE If your credit isn't great, here are a few tips to improve it: ●Pay your bills on time! Again, this is the biggest factor determining your credit score. ●Become an authorized user on someone else's credit account. Just be aware that if they are late on their payments, it could adversely affect you too. ●Open a secured credit card account. This type of account allows you to make a cash deposit to secure your line of credit. This can be a great option for a young person with no credit history. ●Credit cards that offer higher interest but not as strict with credit history. Examples: Credit One, First Premier. ●Get your credit reports from Experian, TransUnion and Equifax to ensure there is no incorrect information. You can access your reports atAnnualCreditReport.com. ●If you find any errors on your report, dispute them! ●If you have debts in collections, work with your creditor to make the account current or at least agree to structure payment arrangements. ●Get credit for making rent and utility payments on time. Several companies offer the service of reporting your payments to the credit bureaus. HOW CREDIT COUNSELING CAN HELP Sometimes, you need help to get on top of your debt. That's critical for improving your credit.Christian Credit Counselorscan be a great option. Christian Credit Counselors does not arrange debtconsolidation. Instead, they help you set up a debtmanagementprogram to pay off your debts in full up to 80% faster, at a lower interest rate and with very manageable payments. Working with a credit counseling agency does not negatively affect your credit score. A combination of the high balances and how many accounts you close is what will determine your credit score at the start of the Debt Management Program. As you pay down your balances and pay off your accounts through the program, your score will continue to improve. Your credit report will show a history of consistent on time payments and it will show that your balances are decreasing and accounts are being paid off. When you complete your Debt Management Plan not only will you be debt free but you'll also see an improvement in your credit score and overall financial situation. LISTENER QUESTIONS On today's program, Rob also answers listener questions: ●What is the best way to invest money for the short term for a family with three young kids? ●When does it make sense to take money out of savings and invest it? RESOURCES MENTIONED ●Find a Certified Kingdom Advisor ●Sound Mind Investing Remember, you can call in to ask your questions most days at (800) 525-7000 or email them toQuestions@MoneyWise.org. Also, visit our website atMoneyWise.orgwhere you can connect with a MoneyWise Coach, join the MoneyWise Community, and even download the free MoneyWise app. Like and Follow us on Facebook atMoneyWise Mediafor videos and the very latest discussion!Remember that it's your prayerful and financial support that keeps MoneyWise on the air. Help us continue this outreach by clicking theDonate tab on our websiteor in our app. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/1085/29

In our Hot Topic this week we have Christy Moss, CMB, Head of Sales and Marketing @ FORMFREE The discussion will focus on a new program to help borrowers benefit from positive rent payment history. Want to know more aboutChristy Moss? Click here to read more on this podcast!! In our Hot Topic this week we have Christy Moss, CMB, Head of Sales and Marketing @ FORMFREE The discussion will focus on a new program to help borrowers benefit from positive rent payment history. Want to know more aboutChristy Moss? Click here to read more on this podcast!!

In our Hot Topic this week we have Christy Moss, CMB, Head of Sales and Marketing @ FORMFREE The discussion will focus on a new program to help borrowers benefit from positive rent payment history. Want to know more aboutChristy Moss? Click here to read more on this podcast!!

The typical case against the homeowner involves the participation of a company claiming to be the servicer. While the company might perform certain functions of the statutory definitions in the regulation of "servicers," it is actually rare that it is the recipient of money paid by homeowners and even more rare that it is the disburser of payments to "creditors." But even if the payment history produced by a representative of the servicer is authentic, it might be barred or struck from evidence, based upon the expert opinion of a certified public accountant. The opinion of the CPA would simply be that it is impossible to determine the balance of the loan account from the payment history. Without looking at the accounting ledger of the creditor, the payment history is merely a recitation of activity during the time that the alleged loan was serviced. The balance of the alleged loan account as claimed by the company claiming to be the servicer is only an estimate. And typically there is no representative of the company claiming to be a servicer that can say that they have seen the accounting ledger of the creditor --- or even that they know who the creditor is.  

Starting next month, Fannie Mae will make it easier for renters to qualify for home loans. Reporter AnnaMaria Andriotis joins host J.R. Whalen to explain how renters' ability to make monthly payments will be used by lenders along with other data found on credit reports to determine their eligibility for mortgages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://www.kevinshortle.com/I have noticed that some people in our industry have and are being trained the wrong way. They think in terms of reward first. In this episode, I explain the correct approach to note investing. If you would like to talk to me about investing and how I can help you, send me an email: kevin@kevinshortle.com

If you enjoyed Day 1 of the 5 Day Credit Repair Challenge: Payment History, stick around for part 2 and grab your Free Credit Resources HERE NOW: http://solo.to/mrandmrssmith --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/mrandmrssmith/message

Learn To Master Your Money: https://bit.ly/3ybUu2I -Get out of debt, increase your net worth and live a better life. http://bit.ly/4StepsToMakeMoneyOnline Tools To Master Your Money http://4dmbox.com Leave a Like if you enjoyed! Subscribe to be a Box and enable notifications! ► https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0n7VW-Nfwb8tJkMePslIuA?sub_confirmation=1 debt, loans, stock market, money, make money, make money online, personal finance, crypto, debt free, how to pay off debt, manage your money, personal finance tips, how to make money,Employer Wants 10 YEARS Of Payment History --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/4dmbox/support

This episode on your payment and History of credit. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/denise-cofield/support

That our future resources are going to be far greater than our present resources. What does that really mean when you borrow money? It should be used to grow your personal assets or you are in a position to grow your business so that you can be successful, hire people and spread the wealth. The Use of Credit is based on the assumption that are future resources are greater than our present resources Are you using credit to build wealth? What is Credit made up of? It is your history, your Score, and your credit report Myths about Credit clarified: You don't need to carry a balance but you do need to use your credit All credit reports are not the same, we have Transunion and Equifax, there can be discrepancies Checking your credit will impact your score, there is a difference between hard and soft credit pull. Having now credit is not good credit, no record is not good because you are seen more as a risk Pay off derogatory debts and settling can remove it from your credit, only in 6-7 years will it be removed, You can't get it removed unless it was a mistake The difference between a consumer proposal and bankruptcy. Why do you need good Credit? The better your credit the better your rates and terms & conditions of the mortgages To buy or rent a home Employers are pulling credit To Start a business Student Loans now are checking your credit Buying or leasing a Car Auto or home insurance There is a need to do your best to maintain good credit What is Good Credit There is a scale from 300-900 Under 500 is Bad 500-600 is Not Good 600-700 ready to by 700-800 very good 800-900 Excellent What impacts your Score 35% is Payment History 30% is Utilization, how much of your credit are you using, it helps to bring down your balances to look good to lenders 10% - Types of Credit you have e.g. credit cards, mortgages, lines of credit - Lenders prefer to see major types of credit cards 10% - Pursuit of new credit - how much new credit are you shopping for 15% - Credit History Your Credit Score does not define you, you can rebuild from a bad Score Contact Siobhan Bent - Mortgages 4 Moms www.mortgages4moms.com info@siobhanbent.com www.siobhanbent.com 416-505-3067 Instagram: @mortgages4moms A secret the Banks don't want you to know  - The Rule of 72 A simple calculation to determine how long it will take for you to double your money, banks and lender use this simple rule to determine how long it will take to double their money while extending credit to you. Set a debt Freedom date 2 ways to decide which debts to pay of debts first Smallest debts first to feel like you've seen success quickly then move on the tackle the next largest debt Tackling the debts with the highest interest debt or most costly. Listen in for more excellent tips on improving your credit and using your good credit to build wealth Listen in to get more nuggets!!

Selecting strong renters can be the difference between a cash-flowing property or an alligator. Even if you can get a judgment on a tenant that owes you big, collecting on that judgment is not a guarantee.    On this episode, Steve White From RentPrep gives us the scoop on how you, as a landlord, can do the proper due diligence on your applicants to save you time, money, and headaches.  Website: https://rentprep.com/?utm_source=roofstock&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=steve-media-outreach-2021 The "RentPrep for Landlords" Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rentprep-for-landlords/id851540886 The "RentPrep for Landlords" Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/RentPrep --- Transcript   Michael: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of remote real estate investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today I'm joined by Steve White, founder and CEO of rent prep. And today Steve and I are going to be talking about all things tenant background check related. And we're also going to delve into some things that you can do personally to boost your credit score. So there's a lot of fun information in here. Let's jump into it.   Well, Steve White, thanks so much for joining us today, man. Really appreciate you taking the time.   Steve: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.   Michael: Absolutely. So you're the founder and CEO of rent prep, right practice? Yes, I really want to want to dive into what that is. But I would love to get a little bit about your background first, and how you got into the space?   Steve: Sure, yeah, I'm totally on accident. I never intended to be doing background checks at all. So I, I got out of the Marine Corps, I served eight years took an opposite direction. And most of the guys that I knew that were getting out and becoming police officers, or getting into law enforcement in some way, and I sort of went the corporate america route, and I worked for a company that played a really niche role in a legal process called a replevin order. Nobody's probably ever heard of that. But…   Michael: No, what is that?   Steve: So if you can imagine, as you're driving down the road, and you see these really big, like, street paving machines, that, you know, like construction equipment that are usually like a million dollar piece of equipment, the company, if the company stops paying for it, and the bank wants that piece of equipment back, you can't just go and pick something like that up. And so if you   Michael: Take a put on a tow truck,   Steven: Right, no, it's a huge process, you usually got to break it down into pieces and ship it in on multiple vehicles. So what we were doing was arranging those replevin orders that were that had to be organized in the local municipality. So we would have to coordinate with the sheriff's department and local attorneys and, and get all this stuff organized. So I was doing that, you know, on the corporate side, kind of in the banking world and decided I could do it on my own and started a company that did exactly that. And I started it in 07, which was perfect timing for the big financial recession that happened two years later.   Michael: Right!   Steve: And, yeah, that definitely put a damper on things and made us get really creative for looking outside of the box with different business ideas. And we had a client that that basically came to us and said, hey, I've got rental properties. And you guys are using software to track down pieces of equipment and figure out where you know, where job sites are, where people might be where people might be hiding things, do you think you can tap into that or use some of that same, you know, access that you have to let me know if somebody would be a good tenant or not. And like any good entrepreneur, I said, we can absolutely do that for you before I knew how to do it.   So the business started there really what it is today, and we ended up within about two years selling, we split it up into different divisions, sold the replevin side and put everything into the background screening side. And that's really where we got our start working for usually, at that time, large property management companies, large apartment communities, mostly local, I was, you know, going around knocking on doors and trying to set businesses up.   It wasn't until we started doing, I started doing a lot of speaking engagements at like landlord associations or real estate investor associations, as I started to really see this need for these smaller market landlords to have access to really good screening. And we didn't provide any screening for them at that time. We were just doing this for bigger businesses and larger property management companies. And it seemed crazy to turn away all that business and so we created rent prep as a brand, specifically to give landlords access to really good high-quality screening that typically only the large property management companies are getting.   Michael: Interesting. And so what what type of services reports background checks, can rent prep run?   Michael: Anything that you can imagine in terms of what you would think you would normally get so we're talking credit reports, criminal records, judgments, liens, bankruptcies, eviction records, obviously, address histories, income verifications. So we can reach right into a bank account and get a an average or a summary of data to tell you what their average monthly income is so that you can do a proper income to rent ratio.   And really what makes rent prep different is that we are not always trusting the the courts or the databases to get things correct. So we will live in an age now where if you're somebody like me, my name is Steve White. There are 2600 Steve whites around the country. And in fact, probably somewhere near near you. In California, there's a middle school named Steven M White, which is my exact name. So common names are very common. What we realized was there was a piece missing when you're talking about automating data in that piece is really a human element that you need someone who's trained, who understands the FCRA, which is the compliance arm that that manages our industry, and somebody who can make decisions beyond what, you know, simple filtering can do, and really get better access to data.   So with with the way that we do our screening, we are typically able to find about 50% more eviction records that are filed than what the, you know, what can be found in, let's say, the National eviction database. And so we're in a lot of cases, going directly to the courts in searching, you know, for information, especially if it's a common name, making sure that it is the correct person, anyone that's ever ran a background check for John Smith knows that you're going to spend a good amount of time trying to, you know, determine if it is your john smith, that's a sex offender, or if it's some other john smith, that's a sex offender. So we're taking that responsibility off of the landlord's hands and saying, we'll do that we'll make those determinations, and use our trained eyes to to make sure that you're getting the correct and accurate information.   Michael: Awesome. So this sounds like a service that would be great for somebody that's looking to self manage a small time landlord. But if let's say that's me, I'm I've I have properties and professional property management. And I want to do my own property management now for local properties I own. I've never seen a background check. I've never seen what those reports look like, Is it pretty easy to decipher, and understand and digest that information? Or do I need a technical degree degree to read and digest it?     Steve: Sometimes you feel like you need a technical degree, depending on the person you're running the information on, right?   Michael: How much background they have to show.   Steve: Yeah, yeah, you know, it's funny, because if you get a good tenant, it's really counterintuitive, right? Like, our reports should be super boring.   Michael: Show nothing.   Steve: Yeah, right. Right. A lot of times we get calls from landlords, they're like, yeah, we ran this and nothing came up. Well, that's good. That's, that's what you want. Right? Yeah. Right. But you know, the nice thing is, again, I really my intention is not to come on, and like sell rent Reprep.     Michael: This is this great.   Steve: Yeah, this is really what what I believe separates us from a lot of our competitors in this industry is that for landlords, if they run a background check, and they just say, Hey, I don't know what this means, or I don't look at a lot of credit reports, what, you know, what is this section here? Or really, what is a good credit score, right, so we can offer interpretation. So the landlord can call and speak to the exact screener that built the report and compiled it. So that screener has intimate knowledge of exactly what's on there and helped go through the information with them. We can tell them what the average credit score is for a tenant, which is 650.   Michael: And was that nationwide?   Steve: Yeah, across the country at 649. So, and we can also dive in a little deeper and see, you know, because for one landlord and one property, you know, asking for a minimum credit score of 700 might not be unreasonable. And, and for another landlord and a different property, asking for a 700 might be very unreasonable. And so we want to know, what's the property? Like? What are your you know, what are you getting for rent? What type of tenants are you looking for? and help them try to make a good decision based on what their criteria is.   And every landlords different? Sometimes they know really well with that criteria should be sometimes they know they don't, so we can help kind of guide them in that right direction as well.   Micheal: Oh, that's really interesting. So do you guys collect then, kind of the reverse feed of data with regard to property type and locale and average rent, to then be able to offer that to landlords that come ask you that question?   Steve: It's not something that we're automating. And we're not building that into our reports, although, I feel like you just came up with a really good idea.   Michael: So that one's on me, Steve!   Steve: Right, right. suture idea? They're not, you know, it's really, you know, it's, it's in the moment when they're asking us because we're walking a very clear black and white line, when it comes to report interpretation, we've got to be very careful on our end, we can never make a decision on you know, for landlord. You should or you shouldn't rent to this person, we can only give them based on our experience and based on what their criteria is. So, you know, if a landlord says, you know, I've got this bar and it's pretty high and you know, this, this rental property means a lot to me. I raised my kids in this place, and we moved on and now we're renting it out. And, you know, there's a little bit of an emotional attachment there, and maybe they've got some higher end fixtures that you'd normally see in a rental unit. And so they want to make sure that the quality of tenant they're getting is very high quality.   We'll take that information. And that's how that's exactly how we're interpreting that report for them and saying, either this looks good, or, you know, I look at 200 reports a day. And there's a lot of red flags or risks here and this person doesn't seem to meet the criteria that you're reaching for. So usually, it's it's based on, you know, what the landlord is telling us in that moment, what they're looking for.   Michael: What would be interesting to chasing this rabbit further down this new idea hole is if you collected then eviction records from landlords based on tenants that you had screened, to be able to kind of look at the big data. And if somebody says, what are the most influential characteristics or criteria for a tenant who's going to be evicted? You can have predictive analytics.   Steve: So we do reduce sort of do that right now. There's a feature that, yeah, there's a feature that we have on our credit report, to TransUnion credit report that we're giving a score to that's called a resident score versus a traditional FICO score. And it's taking into consideration exactly like what you just said, there is there are, there are certain patterns and characteristics that people tend to follow who are either good renters and good, good paying renters or not. And so we're waiting, we're weighting those that data a bit different to to generate a little bit of a different score based on knowing that it's built for a rental.   Michael: Interesting. Very interesting. So, Steve, I got to ask the question that might be on everybody's mind. And I mean, all this information sounds really helpful and powerful. And it also sounds expensive. What is it going to cost the landlord to run some of these reports get some of this information?   Steve: Well, again, I feel like you're putting me in the sales man mode. So my sales answer is it's a lot less expensive than an eviction why, right?   Michael: The classic answer!   Steve: Right? Well, listen, you know, in our, our mantra here is always that an ounce of prevention is certainly worth a pound of cure. If you, you know, for landlords, you know, the kiss of death for any landlord is having a bad tenant, I mean, that's the difference between cash flowing positive or not, or having to put a ton of money into repairs, or having to just deal with the headache and nightmare of a bad tenant. You know, we've, we've all heard the horror stories, and a lot of us have seen the pictures that accompany those horror stories, and no, like, I don't ever want that I don't ever want to be in that situation.   So that front end, you know, due diligence that they're doing really is their best chance, especially in today's era, where evictions are next to impossible, if not impossible, depending on what the reasoning is right now. You know, this is the only chance that they have to really, really mitigate that risk is to make a good decision or the best informed decision that they can on the front end. So the cost is relatively inexpensive, and in most states, it's going to probably be less than what they're allowed to charge for application fees. Some states like California and New York, of course, it's going to be potentially outside of what you can charge for an application fee.   So it can range from 1895, for some real basic information, to $38 for a kind of, you know, the full boat of information, and then, and then you can add all kinds of things on there, like the income verification for an extra $10. And those sort of pieces, which are super helpful, because again, you're not you're, especially with the income verification, the last thing you ever want to do is take someone's word for it, or take their information and assume that it is accurate or truthful, and I'm not, I swear to you, I'm not that type of person that has trust issues and doesn't trust them.   But having having done this for a long time, I will tell you that it is far more common than you would probably think, to see doctored credit reports we've seen where the font is slightly different for the score, or you can tell that certain things have been omitted or deleted out paychecks that we've seen that are just completely fabricated. So, you know, with all of our products, we're taking that trust element out and we're you know, we're gathering that data outside of the tenants ability to interfere. So even with our income verification, we're getting that information straight from their bank, not not even their employers because a lot of employers nowadays too are trying to protect their employees information and they won't release salary information to you.   So the only way the only way around that is to go straight to the banks and and start taking a look at how much money is being deposited on a monthly basis. And we can, you know, share all that information with the landlords and tell them exactly what their income is, which may include, you know, we're also in the age of the side hustle. So a lot of people have their job plus their side hustle job and gathering some extra money. And so we want to look at the whole thing, you know, in as a as a, as a total or as a full picture versus, you know, gathering information from one employer and then trusting that they're, they're giving us accurate information about their 1099 side hustle money that's not really trackable, and you just sort of have to take them at their word what they're making on it.   Michael: Sure. Oh, that makes sense. Well, I experienced the horror story with my first tenant $10,000 in damage on the way out and small claims court eviction, the whole nine yards. So I do have trust issues. So I get it. It just, it kills me when people don't go to that level of due diligence, or they cheap out and get the basic and, again, not not promoting Rentprep or any other service, but like, just don't get the cheapest package you can. It's the equivalent of getting a property inspection, we do so much work on the diligence on the physical property, inspecting it, looking through it with a fine tooth comb. Why aren't we doing the same thing with tenants, this is the equivalent. So don't skimp on it, folks. Just pay the 10 bucks the extra 20 bucks and get it run.   Steve: Yeah do it now in a lot of times, that information that you may be skipping out on may hold the key to exactly what you want to avoid. So if you're looking at, for example, you know, property damage, and let's say that tenant that you were talking about that did $10,000 worth of damage. I'm assuming did you end up getting a judgment on them?   Micheal: We did. But collecting on that judgment is a whole nother story.   Steve: I guess I yeah, I could spend an hour talking about just collecting now. And I'll give landlord. I'll give landlord some good tips. And I'll give you a good tip too that might help you collect on that. But you know, that's a good example, like credit reports omitted judgments about three years ago. So judging is no longer included on a credit report at all.   Michael: Wow.   Steve: And it's we can thank our court system for that because no two courts are alike in the country. The courts are like the what courts are like the Wild West, it's the craziest thing you've ever seen. So you can have neighboring counties and different courts. And let's say you and I both owe money to Old Navy, we both got an Old Navy card. And we wanted to spend a ton of money on jeans and T shirts. And we just said let's do a   Michael: They've gpt great, great deals.   Steve: Right? So and then we both defaulted on the same day. And Old Navy Old Navy took us both to court on the same day. And we both got a judgment against us on the same day. And my my county court filed the judgment in your county court one county over not even in a different state, but just one county over filed that exact same judgment, same amount, same creditor all the same information, there was a very high chance that my record would end up being reported on my credit and yours would not. So only about 50% of judgments were being recorded on two credit reports which created a really unfair system, because why should I be punished for it right? In New nappy or vice versa. So right, so the credit bureaus decision was okay, the only we can't fix the courts, nobody can seem to do that.   Michael: That's a whole nother issue.   Steve: It is a whole nother issue. But since we can't fix the courts, then the only real fair thing to do here is just leave that information out omit it. And for landlords, you know, that became super dangerous, for obvious reasons of you're not going to be able to see that information, the other dangerous reasons because literally overnight, 22 million people saw almost a 10% increase in their credit score, just because of a you know, back end office move. That doesn't doesn't mean that they're trying to improve because of credit behaviors. But because we eliminated a an adverse piece of information that wasn't going to affect them negatively. So everybody's scores went up.   Michael: Wow. So in a kind of just real world example to paraphrase and make sure I understand this, if I'm I find this Navy Old Navy, credit card user and I went really crazy, like really crazy and I owe a let's say eight grand a month to old neighbor. And my income shows five grand a month getting deposited into my bank account, which is the income verification part of that I have a negative $3,000 a month habit burning a hole in my pocket, but you as the landlord or end user of that report will not see that.   Steve: You will not see any judgments just like the judgment that you have on that that tenant that did $10,000 of damage. Now obviously, as a landlord, you want to tell other landlords like, hey, beware, like, right? Don't let this guy do what he did to me. I wouldn't wish that on anybody. Most landlords have that mindset of, You know, I don't want someone else to have to suffer. But unless that landlord, that new landlord is doing a judgment search specifically, they'll never know about that judgment that you got on that tenant that that judgment will not haunt them, like every tenant, or every landlord wishes that it would in your mind, in your mind when you're going through all the steps to issue that judgment and get it and you finally have in your guess, this is a moral victory. It's a principle win! It's not unless it's unless someone else is looking it up. Otherwise, it's, you know, does it exist? Does a tree fall in the woods? if no one's around to hear it? It's like, you know, is that does that judgment even really exist? If the landlord's not looking for it?     Michael: But so this is a searchable thing that that rent prep can do?   Steve: Yeah, these are civil court record searches that are now emitted from credit reports. But we can reach into the courts and pull those those records out. So yeah, so a deeper dive is certainly worth it, especially in cases like yours.   Michael: Oh, yeah. So Steve, curious to know, in your experience, what are some of those major red flags that somebody who's looking at a red prep or some kind of other background check information report, could see and look to glean and say, Okay, if I'm seeing these four things, are these three things I either need to stop and pause? Or this is a definite non starter for me?   Steve: Well, I'll start right from the application process, because I feel like almost every landlord has run into this situation where somebody doesn't want to give their information. And they're going to claim that it's because they don't want to put their social security number down because they want to keep that private.   Michael: Yep. I've done that as a renter.   Steve: Okay, so now that one or two things are happening here, and it's important that landlords understand this, too. And I'm not saying you were wrong to do that. And you may have been very reasonable to do it. And so   Michael: I'm great renter.   Steve: Yeah, right. Okay, so, perfect point. Great renters want great landlords, right? If you don't trust this person that you're giving your information to, you're not going to give all your information. So part of the what we're doing like with our private Facebook community, or even a lot of our educational content, on rent prep calm, is really talking about how to be a good landlord, because good, the best tenants want good landlords. And if you're, if you're not presenting yourself, well, you're going to run into that more often than you want to where people are closed and don't want to give you the information because they, to be quite honest, they just don't trust you with it.   So that's one thing. The other thing is, what we have seen here and learned here and processing, as many reports, as we do is that more often than not, if somebody does not want to get the information, or if they intentionally give the wrong information, which we see a lot of somebody's flip flops a social security number, or adds a zero where it should be an eight. More often than not, they're they're trying to hide something that they're doing that knowing like, I don't want them to find this information. And it's better to have a no result or can't find the result versus seeing the negative result that would come up.   So I would say, you know, for a landlord, that first red flag is going to be if you start seeing a lot of generic information on a on an application. And, you know, first thing might be check yourself, make sure you're you're not the problem is the landlord like am I am I presenting myself well, and this thing, well, my, my professional and my handling this thing properly? Or do I seem like the type of person that somebody is not going to be comfortable sharing their information with, after the after that I would say, you know, for looking at the actual reports, what those red flags might be, I would set the obvious ones first, if they have a judgment from a previous landlord on their, or a property management company. And the tip I would give landlords is property management companies are obvious, right? It'll be ABC property management or, you know, ABC apartment community or whatever. But if you just see a person's name on there, you know, if it's just a Steven White as the creditor, or the plaintiff, there's a good chance that that's probably a landlord and it's definitely worth either calling the screening company to get a little bit further information, maybe they can help and tell you what it is. But it's not going to show up always as super obvious, like a judgment from Old Navy, or a judgment from ABC property management company.   So keep an eye out when you see individual names like that a lot of times it's it's from a landlord.   Michael: Okay.   Steve: The other one is going to be their their payment history. So if you're looking at a credit report, understand that most people pay things based on priority. If I, you know, that I'm going to collect a late fee, and maybe even have my vehicle repossessed if I don't make the payments on it promptly. I'm going to make sure that I pay that car payment ahead of some other payments, like my dentist bill who, maybe he hits me with a little late fee, maybe not, maybe I can call him and talk to Nancy, you know, the office manager and talk her out of a payment, you know, late fee or something.   But really, it comes to a prioritization. So if you start seeing late payments and a shaky payment history, and it's even for things that I would consider to be high priorities, such as housing, rent, those types of things, that's usually a red flag, too, because if these are high priority items that they can't make timely payments on. That's usually a sign of distress, and not that they're creatively trying to manage their finances and choosing, okay, well, maybe I can pay this thing late this month. But this one's a priority, I need to pay it. So good. renters always prioritize the rent payment, above all else, you know, that's their housing, that's the thing that needs to get paid above their Old Navy bill or buying, you know, beer and smokes for the weekend. So you want to make sure that rent payment is its top priority.   So you're looking for somebody that knows how to prioritize, and evictions, evictions are obvious. You know, that's that probably the single most important piece of data that you can gather to show somebody prior history with renting. Now, the issue with that is, obviously have an eviction moratorium, right now that's going on. You have some states like the wonderful state of New York that I'm in that eliminated evictions from being viewed at all. So landlords cannot even look at an eviction when they're considering or doing their screener in considering a new tenant makes it really tough. It's like, you know, tying one hand behind your pack and trying to trying to fight.   So, but that eviction data is super critical, because evictions don't always you know, what the media or people sometimes portray as sort of a victim situation where somebody, you know, their kid got sick, and they lost their job, and they can't pay their rent, and now they got evicted, you're evicted. And it's tragic. Those are not the typical scenarios, you know, the typical scenario is the guy who has parties and kicked holes in the wall or flushed his socks down the toilet, and, and you don't want to rent to this person or in New York's case, they're in their mind, they're trying to protect tenants. But it's, it's so counterproductive. Because if you if you evicted somebody for being aggressive to a neighbor, or another tenant in a building, and that was the basis for the eviction, now you're eliminating the next landlord to be able to see that information and make that decision and, and putting all the other tenants at risk. So the eviction data is critical. And I would say more often than not, the evictions are not some really sad, tragic story about somebody whose circumstances were well beyond their control and they're, they're a victim of, you know, a broken system. Most of the evictions that we see are certainly well deserved. And landlords need to be aware.   Michael: Yeah. So are we entering now, a new cycle? I mean, whenever evictions, the the moratorium gets lifted, the fact that that information from this stretch of time is not going to be able to be viewed by landlords. Do you? Do you foresee a really tough next rental cycle where landlords are going to be dealing with a lot of crummy tenants because they didn't have access to the full picture?   Steve: For sure. And I would say, you know, the mindset for the terrible mindset in a lot of ways, but I know a lot of businesses have had the mindset of, this pandemic has been rough on business, obviously, some more than others. But I heard somebody say, never let a good pandemic go to waste. Like if you're going to, if you're going to try to make lemonade out of being handed a couple of lemons, you're going to take that opportunity and don't think that tenants aren't going to do the same. So anything that would have been maybe just bad, you know, bad character or bad payment history or being irresponsible now has the easy go to pandemic blame to say like, Well, that was related to the pandemic. And so, you know, you can't count that. So I think a lot of people are going to abuse that, you know, and especially when it comes to evictions, or even just simply their own personal finances. You know, we're seeing that here, pretty much on a daily basis where somebody never lost her employment never took a pay decrease throughout the entire pandemic, but as using the pandemic as a legitimate reason to be able to get out of paying things on time or taking full advantage of it, and so that's gonna, that's gonna take a while to work its way through the system for sure, unfortunately.   Michael: So how can landlords combat that or what is rent prep doing to help landlords combat that?   Steve: Well, one of the things that landlords are going to need to be aware of his credit bureaus themselves are working really hard to hide information. That was pandemic related. And again, you're not going to avoid people who abuse the system, if they're going to be out there. And it's going to happen, unfortunately, but at least you're not putting on putting it on the landlord to have to make that decision.   So the idea is, if we just hide that information, and you don't see it, the landlord can't make a mistake, and, and use a piece of information against somebody that they shouldn't have.   Michael: Got it.   Steve: So at least at least it's holding them, you know, less liable in terms of a compliance error or discriminating against somebody who they shouldn't be. But beyond that, I would say the landlord's like, like always, nothing's really changed, have really good communication, ask a lot of questions. If you see something come up on a report, or credit report or, you know, criminal record or anything, start asking questions.   It's not always a black and white thing, when you're looking at this type of data, it's not always as simple as well, they've got a criminal record. So they must be bad, we're not going to run through them. You know, people change and a lot of times, you know, they don't need to suffer endlessly for a mistake that they made. And a lot of times, they come out a lot better afterwards. And so those conversations are critical for a landlord to be able to say, does this criminal record, really truly impact whether or not this person is going to be a good renter for me or not? And a lot of times, even a criminal record with with some clarity around it may not be as concerning as it as it seems, initially. So good communications to key there.   Michael: Yeah, it's such a great point. And I know for I know, for me, too, as someone who, when I was first looking at credit background checks, that was a big scary one for me, but the fact that you could chat with an account rep at RentPrep and start to have those conversations with the tenant, it doesn't necessarily need to be a non starter, it can be Oh, let's try to understand what's going on. Because you're right, it shouldn't. People's past doesn't need to haunt them for eternity.   Steve: Right. And I'll say this, too, especially when it comes to evictions, we know that the data shows that somebody is three times more likely to be evicted again, once they've been evicted once, hmm, the reason for that is because that fear of the unknown is gone. Right? Like, if you've never gone through an eviction, you don't know what's gonna happen, like, are the police gonna come and throw me out what, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to think have, you know what the potentials are, because I don't know it. And it's scary. Once it's happened, and they know the ins and outs of it, it becomes a lot less scary.   So if you see somebody that had an eviction, five years ago, four years ago, it may not be as big of a red flag, as you might think, you know, number one, they've only had one and not three. So that's, that's a positive, right? But it's always it's always worth the conversation. If you're on the fence, if everything else looks good, and it's this one piece that you're like, I just don't feel great about this. Don't be afraid to call that person up and say, Hey, I saw that you had an eviction on here, talk me through that, what what happened there? And you might find that it was a, something that happened, that's not going to happen again, or something that they learn from and doesn't seem like, you know, it's it's a it's a pattern or something that is going to creep up again.   And so it's always worth having good communication. Background checks are great conversation starters. You know, so rank that way. Yeah.   Michael: Great point. Steve. I'm curious because we were chatting about it a little bit ago that I was someone that never liked when I was renter putting my social security number on on applications. What is the impact for a renter of getting a background check or a credit check? I mean, does that does that affect their credit score? Does that show up as a true inquiry like if you get a new Old Navy credit card for instance?   Steve: Yeah, so thank god TransUnion, who is the In my opinion, the best credit bureau the best one to work with certainly, and I think the ones who really have had their stuff together, you know, working with the all three different credit bureaus TransUnion, as has been the best one for us to work with. And about two, maybe three months ago, they passed, sweeping changes that in the housing industry for rentals that Inquiries were no longer going to be hard inquiries or affect their credit. And this was a huge, huge change, right?   Because if you live in an area like Portland, OR San Francisco or, you know, there seems to be a million of them now, even even if you have perfect credit, the chances of you applying to someplace and getting it on the first shot are almost slim to none like, most people, most people are applying to 10 different places. So and hoping that one of them hits and one of them lands, you know, so Long gone are the days where you put in a rental application with a solid background and you're guaranteed going to get it there's a real high chance that you're going to end up submitting multiple and having multiple background checks ran on you. So TransUnion saw this and and i think handled the issue correctly, which was make it a non issue, it no longer affects anyone's credit to pull their credit for rental purposes.   The way it used to be, was the same rules that applied for anything they want to do eliminate credit fishing. So if you go to Old Navy, and I'm trying to think of some tribal colloquia here and get this local stuff where so you got an Old Navy, and you get a card and Trader Joe's and I don't know, can't think of another one here, but some other, you know, department store or wherever that they're offering you, you know, credit, the Bureau's would see that as this is not good, if this person's applying for all of these things in a short window of time, it's usually an abuse of credit, it's usually what they call fishing. So if you get denied for one credit card, and then the next thing you do is apply for another one, and then another one until you get the credit limit that you want or the line that you want. That was something that they would punish people for. But in the rental industry, obviously, that's not the case, like you could very well apply 5-10 different places and doesn't mean that you're fishing, or you're doing anything weird, it just means you live in a really competitive area that there's more applicants than there is housing.   Michael: Well, that's great. And that's great information to know both as a renter, someone who's going to be potentially renting and also as a landlord to have those conversations with folks that don't want to give your social security number for fear that that that's no longer an issue.   Steve: Yeah, that was a huge deal for us. Because we would deal with a lot of inquiry disputes, which was a real, a real administrative pain for us on the compliance end of things because somebody would say, Hey, you know, I applied to this place, but I didn't think they'd actually pull my credit. And I want to get this credit inquiry off my credit report. And we'd have to go through this really lengthy process with them. And so now that doesn't even exist. It's been Yeah, it was like a real smart, one of those rare times where you're like, Man, that made sense. And in every logical way, and everyone did the right thing. I feel like that just doesn't happen all the time where you're like, we solve the problem efficiently.   Michael: And now it's working.   Steve: Yeah, right. Right. Right. But in that case, TransUnion really did get it right. Beyond that, I would think most people that their reason for not wanting to share their social security number is, you know, they're afraid of who's looking at it, what's going to happen, does this mean that my information is going to get stolen? Right, and the ugly truth that nobody wants to hear, but I see it from a different point of view working on the data side is your information has probably already been stolen. And your your information is far easier to access than anybody would ever wish or hope. That's that's the that's the unfortunate ugly reality that we pretty.   Micheal: It's pretty scary what you can find when just by googling stuff.   Steve: Yeah, yeah, for sure.   Michael: I've got a question, Steve. And then I want to wrap this up. And I don't know if there's a quick answer for this. You tell me if we need to do a homebuyer episode around this. But why in the heck, are there three separate credit agencies to begin with? Why can't we just have one?   Steve: Good question, I think so I can tell you maybe a little bit of the, the genesis of it and the reason why there's three bureaus and why the three bureaus have different scores. That's something that we hear we hear a lot like my TransUnion scores 600 but my Equifax score is 650. Like, why the discrepancy? So So first off, when it comes to scores, those are, especially if we're talking about FIFO. Everyone knows FIFO or is from the word, but FIFO is an actual accounting company. That's fair. Isaac's Fair, Isaac's companies with FIFO stands for. They're a privately held company, and they don't share their algorithm for scoring even with the credit bureaus. So nobody knows the secret sauce of what it is that that goes into it.   So the issue with so many different scores really comes from who's doing the who's doing the algorithms? And what are the what are the scores being based on? So after the big financial crisis in oh eight, the A lot of companies responses to how do we, how do we get back, you know, economically from a recession? And unfortunately, the answer was, well, we should create like a bell curve for credit scores. And so there's different FICO models that have, you could take the exact same information and put it into the model. And depending on the, which version of the FICO model that you're using, if it's an old four model, that would be from 2004, that's what they would consider to be the classic model, then there's an 08 model, which is like the recession model, so you're gonna have a much more inflated number.   And so the answer is that because there's a lot of different industries, so that's the same reason why you have a lot of different scoring models. And the same reason that you have three different credit bureaus is because at one point in time, the credit bureaus, each sort of specialized in an industry. And it's a lot less of that now, they're pretty broad. Some of them might specialize more, that's why sometimes you might have like a Verizon bill that shows up on TransUnion, but not Equifax or something like that. Or some sort of utility bill is usually what we see that shows up on some and not others. So that's the real reason, the reason that there's only three? I don't know. Those became sort of the accepted standard, and anyone else who's created anything, has not had the adoption rate that you would need to legitimize that type of information. And we've seen it over the years.   Michael: A true rating agency.   Steve: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, they've become the standard, they've they carry credibility. Lenders trust them, obviously, landlords trust them, you know, all different industries are trusting them. And so for anyone else to sort of step into the arena and want to create the same thing, it's a really, really high, high barrier to climb over because they're missing all of that credibility that the three bureaus have.   Micheal: sure they're already the three 800 pound gorillas in the room.   Steve: That's it? Yeah. Okay. You know, the one thing that I would say landlords need to be aware of, too, is, you know, I know the government right now has been talking about creating a centralized Bureau, that's something that we're keeping an eye on really, really closely in our industry, and I, I don't necessarily hate the idea, right. Like, I love the idea of standardizing as much as possible, it makes things a lot more accurate. My concern there, especially for landlords is, you know, be really interesting to see how the government achieves that or what their plan is for it. But again, I feel like there's, you know, there's a lot of missed information when you start talking about those types of things.   So what's going to be included? What's not included? Who's actually determining what information is fair or not fair. And again, you know, using New York as an example, the best example I can come up with is those evictions, you know, where New York determines that it's not fair to use them and talk to any landlord here in New York? And they'll tell you, it's absolutely insane. And why shouldn't we use that. So, you know, when you lose that type of control, then you start losing your grip on that type of information that you might be able to make a really well informed decision on. So that would be my concern with with having one central credit, credit bureau is who's determining what gets reported and what's not.   Michael: Makes total sense. And I've got one final question to kind of reward all the listeners who stuck through with us till the very end and understanding fully that we don't know what the secret sauce is, but a question I get all the time, just in life in the Roofstock Academy. How do I boost my credit score? What are some things I can do? Do you have any insight, any tips?   Steve: I do? I do. And it's it's funny, we some, you know, all the screeners here pretty much every employee here at Red prep, we look at so many credit reports we really do where it is our own badge of honor, we probably talked about our own personal credit scores more than the employees normally what. It is like bragging rights, like, Oh, I got my score up over 800 because you sort of see you see how the game is played and what you're trying to do?   So first and foremost, if you are not automating every payment that affects your score, you need to stop what you're doing and do that right now. Go set it up in your bank, or with the with the creditor, whoever it is, whether it be a car payment, whatever, if it affected their reporting, your payments, you need to make sure that you automate those payments so you can never miss a payment even accidentally. That would be first and foremost. Payment History. Bears so much weight on a score, that if you screw it up and you miss a payment, even if it's accidental, even if you have a legitimate reason, even if it's a great reason, it's going to impact your score in ways that you don't want it to. So first and foremost, automate your payments that impact your score and then prioritize from there.   Second would be careful what you apply for, don't think that you can go to five different auto dealerships and apply at five different places. And that's not going to affect your score negatively it will, the rental industry, like we just talked about is about the only industry that you can do that now, sort of fish for credit, anything else, if you do that, that's going to negatively impact your score, even if you get the credit. So, you know, if you apply for three credit cards over a stretch of three months, and you get every credit card that you apply for, that still has the chance to negatively impact your credit score, because too many inquiries for a specific industry.   So if you apply for an auto loan, a mortgage and a credit card all in the same month, it's not going to impact you, that's three inquiries. But if you apply for three credit cards in a month, that's going to impact your credit, because they're all they're all from the same industry. And then I would say, the other thing is carry, depending on your depending on your credit, if you don't have any debts, it's not always a good idea to just pay things off and close them out. So if you don't have a lot of credit bearing accounts, and you just happen to pay everything off, it's for sure a good idea to keep one or two cards, buy some stuff, pay it off monthly, just just so you can generate payment information because no information is not always good either, you know, a lack of information, lack of payment details, what we hear in our, in our industry, we call that a thin file, somebody who just doesn't have a lot of payment information seems like it would be not bad, right? Like, well, it's not bad information. So it must be good. It's not, you know, no information, sometimes it's you know, can damage your score almost as much as bad information.   So keep something you know, keep a credit card, have a low balance, pay it off, but show that you're making payments on it, so that at least it can tick that box every month showing that you're making consistent payments, if you just pay everything off, and there's no record of anything, it won't take long before your score starts slipping.   Michael: Okay. And something that I've heard is to increase credit limits. So that way you end and continue spending the same amount. So your available credit goes up. But the amount you're utilizing stays small.   Steve: Your debt to limit ratio, right, like what you actually owe, and what your limit or ability is to borrow. That is calculated. So if you can, because what you don't want to do is you don't want to be maxed out, or even close to or above 80%. Because that does start to impact your score because they're looking at it as if things go bad. What's your ability to pull yourself out of that situation? If you don't have the available credit to erase that debt that you have? Then you're you're in a bad spot? So yeah, that's a really good point. If you can get a line increase or limit increase, do it worth it. You got to be responsible. I mean, it's like a load.   Oh man I feel dangerous like giving this advice. But yeah, if you're going to be responsible, and you're doing it with that intention, not a bad idea. If you can't be trusted with credit, and you're trying to really repair your your credit, your credit score, you know, then you're good. But for some people, I feel like they, you know, they shouldn't be trusted with a two year limit. It's just yeah, it's bad idea.   Michael: That's, that's that's playing with fire.   Okay, awesome. Well, Steve, I want to be very conscientious of your time. Thank you so much for hanging out with us today and talking to us about RentPrep and just landlord screening in general, what's the best way for folks to either get ahold of you or rent prep or utilize any of the services that that you offer?   Steve: Everything's at RentPrep.com it's a super good resource for landlords to look anything up from tips on how to turn over a property tips for good showings, tips for screening, obviously, and finding the best tenants. And then we've got a private Facebook community that we're really proud of. It's about 12,000 landlords, we will actually not allow landlords, more landlords are not allowed in the group that are allowed in the group we are super picky with who gets in the group and who doesn't. Because we want to try to keep the streets clean and keep it a really safe place for landlords to go and, and share knowledge and help each other out. So there's no no selling in there. You can't be a guru and sell your latest course and that kind of stuff. We want to make sure real landlords and helping each other we see a lot of really great you know, interactions in there, like, you know, somebody has a house fire in their rental property and they're scared to death and don't know what, what's next what to do and, and you'll, you'll see, you know a handful of landlords three or five of them that say, you know this happened to me within the past year, here's what you can expect, here's what you need to do. And so it's filling in those gaps for those landlords and erasing some of that fear of the unknown for them.   So that's our Facebook community, rent prep for landlords, and then also our podcast, which is the rent prep podcast, which I'm sure you can find on iTunes and Stitcher. And we're about 300 plus episodes in tons of great knowledge there. Obviously, you should be listening to Roofstock's podcasts as well. So I'm not trying to steal your audience or anything. But our podcast is, is hosted by Andrew Schultz, who is a professional property manager. And this guy has seen it all and shares a ton of really, really useful information. And it's a it's a good podcast, if you're a landlord, who is looking for, you know, ways to manage your property better or looking to you know, what's going on in the industry currently.   So that's a good way to connect with us there and live chat call in mean, we're a real company. got real real here. seems crazy nowadays, like many people call us and say like, oh, it caught me off guard, like somebody actually answered the phone. But yeah, we're, you know, we're an old school company, you can call us and talk to somebody, you can reach us on email and live chat and all that sort of stuff. You know, we're here to answer questions. And I would even say, there's no such thing as a crazy question. Here. We get it all.   Michael: So just just crazy people, right?   Steve: Plenty of those.     Michael: Thank you so much for hanging out with us. Really appreciate it. We'll have to have you back on a future episode and take care man.   Steve: Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate you having me on.   Michael: All right, everybody. That was our episode a big, big, big thank you to Steve. This was a lot of fun. I learned a ton. I'm going to be definitely putting a lot of this into practice and look forward to using a lot of these features as I look to self manage a few properties. So again, thank you everybody. If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to leave us a rating or review wherever it is listening to episodes. We love Comments, feedback, additional episodes, ideas on the things that you all want to hear about. We look forward to seeing on the next one. Happy investing.   

On this episode, IAmAshley discusses what the payment history category consists of and what lenders like to see when it comes to this category. She also gives tips on how to win in this category as well as sharing what the most important debt is that you do not want to make a late payment on.

For today's “Ugly Question.” "Would you know the going price range of performing first position mortgages with equity and good payment history?" Cash Flow Expo (Feb 18 - Feb 20): https://carolinacapital.krtra.com/t/9FtJDkCiMRdT Carolina Capital is a hard money lender serving the needs of the “Real Estate Investor” and the "Small Builder" borrower who is striving to build wealth and generate income for themselves and their families. We offer “hard money rehab loans” and "Ground-up Construction Loans" for investors only in NC, SC, GA, VA, and TN (some areas of FL, as well). As part of our business practices, we also serve as consultants for investors guiding them to network with other investors and educating them in locating and structuring transactions. Rarely, if ever, will you find a hard money lender willing to invest in your success like Carolina Capital Management. Listen to our Podcast: https://thealternativeinvestor.libsyn.com/ Subscribe: http://thealternativeinvestor.libsyn.com/rss Visit our website: https://carolinahardmoney.com YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYzCFOvEt2n9TchgECLwpww/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CarolinaHardMoney/ #Northcarolinahardmoneylenders #Southcarolinahardmoneylenders #HardMoney #RealEstateInvesting #realestatefinancing #mortgage #privatelending  

Alouette has been coaching people on their personal financial situations for over 10 years. She incorporates "real-talk guidance without judgment" into every one of her interactions with her clients. Through her company, Silvertray, she offers specialized consultation to higher education institutions and community organizations that desire to provide customized financial literacy workshops, resources, and services to their students and members. In addition, she offers “Silvertray Saturday Zoom Sessions” once a month, at no charge, for anyone that would like to learn more about money management and be able to discuss their current management habits in a “real-talk, no judgment” environment. Alouette has created original curriculum, workshops and tools that center around each person's relationship with their money, financial management habits, and mindset. She believes that as long as there's breath there's hope (to make better decisions and reach goals). Alouette is passionate about supporting people build their legacy, one step and one leap of faith at a time. In the episode we covered: What is credit? What does it consist of? Payment History, Utilization, Age of Credit, and Mix of Credit. Tips on how to Build Credit and much more. Connect Learn more about Aloutte and Silver Tray: Website: www.silvertray.co Twitter: https://twitter.com/Silvertray3 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/silvertray.ig/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Silvertray.FB To subscribe to her newsletters she provides tips, suggestions, and workshop announcements they can go to https://www.silvertray.co/#subscribe ... More from Here Comes the Sun Podcast: Subscribe: https://anchor.fm/marisolibarra Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/herecomesthesun_podcast/ Get in touch: https://marisolibarra.com/Contact Support my Work by buying me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/Herecomesthesun --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/marisolibarra/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/marisolibarra/support

We discuss the importance of how well you make payments that appear on your credit reports and their impact on your credit score. It is significant. Master this pillar and you are well on your way to an excellent credit score.

I recently learned a tip that I applied for my own credit, and it worked! So I am sharing this with you. If you have late payment history on a credit card, that payment history may be hurting your score when all other items on your credit are in good standing. There are LOTS of people who have a great credit profile, and perhaps one credit credit that had a late payment or two in the past. If this is you or someone you know, then listen in! Consider this action that I did because I too had a(n accidental) late payment hit my credit just this year. I hope this tip works for you, too! www.creditkristi.com kristi@creditkristi.com

Credit scores have a huge influence on finances, but they’re not an end all be all. Learn how to raise your credit score while building up your finances! When Your Credit Scores Matter I have to be honest – based on what I know and seeing how people react to them, I’m not a fan of obsessing over your credit score.  However, I also realize that it does have a huge impact on most people’s finances.  Lenders look at your credit score when deciding what rates you qualify for and if you’re looking at a big purchase, like a house, that can mean tens of thousands of dollars (or more) over the life of your mortgage. Some insurance companies also take a portion from your credit report use it to calculate your premiums.  Depending on what industry you’re working in like banking, your employer may check your credit as a precaution.  So I get the concern on why you’d be interested in your credit score, but the problem comes up when I see people focused on it like it’s THE number that matters.  So much so that they are willing to try bad vice and end up harming their finances just to get a higher score.  I don’t want you to be in that situation.  The truth is if you’re interested in expanding your options, reducing stress, and building financial freedom for your family, then you need to understand how to make your credit report and score work for you. In this episode we’ll get into: How credit scores work Ways to raise your credit score (and what bad advice to avoid) How to get your money in a situation where your credit score is an afterthought Ready?  Let’s get started! Raise Your Credit Score While Growing Your Money Looking to not only improve your credit score, but your finances? Here are some helpful resources! Best Budget and Money Apps: Personal Capital, Tiller, Mint Grab Your Copy: Jumpstart Your Marriage and Your Money Join Our Thriving Families Community on Facebook One Side Effect of the Virus: Free Credit Reports Each Week 3 Myths That Can Destroy Your Credit Score The Man Without a Credit Score Living off of Cash, Not Credit? Thank You to Our Sponsor Coastal! Support for this podcast comes from Coastal Credit Union. If you’re living in the Raleigh Durham area and looking to bank better, come check out Coastal today! If you’re improving your score because you’re looking to buy a house, they also have competitive mortgage rates! How Credit Scores Work First off, what is your credit score?  Quite simply, your credit scores are calculated based on what is on your credit report. Many people, including myself years ago, use credit reports and credit scores interchangeably.  While they are related they are not the same. At its core, your credit report is a recorded history of your debt payments (credit cards, car and student loans, and mortgages) that allow lenders to determine your creditworthiness.  Whether you get approved for a loan, how much interest you’ll be charged – these are determined by what’s in your reports.  And as weird as it sounds, you have three reports (and scores) because there are three credit bureaus tracking that data- Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax.  Now, what’s in those reports?  Personal information like home address, Social Security number, Loan Accounts, Amounts Owed Payment History Credit Limits and Utilization Your credit score is a number between 300-850 that each of the credit agencies assigns based on the information on your credit report. Now no one gave them permission to collect this data nor are those reports consistently accurate (if you want a quick run of the history, check out this episode of Planet Money), but this is the standard used. Having a ‘good’ or high credit score can be beneficial because you can qualify for better rates with your loans. This is especially significant with your mortgage.  Which is why a family member reached out to me. With the past year, she had managed to pay off all of her non-mortgage debt.  An amazing accomplishment and I told her how proud I was.  Here’s the kicker though – her credit score went down.  Why in the world would that happen? Because of how credit scores are calculated. When she paid off the last of those loans, that lender closed the account.  That’s why I’m not a fan of credit scores. They’re not really a good indicator of your financial health. Ways to Raise Your Credit Score (and Level Up Your Finances) I’ve seen some horrible advice given where people are trying to ‘hack’ their score, but in the long run, it ruins their finances.  Such garbage as: opening several new accounts -typically credit cards- just so you can raise your score. Programs that will wipe away bad credit scores overnight So if you’re looking to raise your credit score because you’re house hunting, I want to take you through how you can build your credit score without having to hurt or harm your long term finances.  Let’s start with key factors that are in your report and are used to calculate your credit score. I’m going to list them in order of weight. Payment History (35%) Amount of Debt Owed (30%) Length of Credit History (15%) New Credit (10%) Types of Credit (10%) So if you want to get the best score possible, you need to focus on those key factors.  Review Your Credit Reports Since your score is based on what’s in those credit reports, you better make sure they got it right! With credit scores being used by lenders to figure out some one’s creditworthiness, you would think that these reports have a high degree of accuracy, but you’d be wrong.  [More than one in five consumers have a “potentially material error” in their credit file that makes them look riskier than they are. Now it used to be that you could go to Annualcreditreport.com to get your reports from all three bureaus for free every year. I don’t know if you call it a bonus, but you now do this for free every week.  If you find a mistake, you can submit a note through the credit bureau, which means creating an account with them. You also want to reach out to that lender. [30-45 days] Automate Your Payments Okay, so your report looks good, we can now move on to the meat – improving your payment history.  Your payment history by far has the biggest influence on your credit score. You want a consistent history of paying your bills on time. If you already have that history, you’ve put yourself in a great spot. If not, don’t worry.  The first step is making sure you are current with your bills and loans. Here’s where bad advice can come in and ruin you. Some may advise you to prioritize your credit cards over your essentials.  Don’t.  Instead, make sure you have the critical bills are taken care of – housing, food, necessary transportation, and health.  We did an episode all about building a better budget so use that to get your finances organized. You can start building up that history and saving yourself time by scheduling those payments using online bill pay through your bank or credit union.  I know some creditors and bills do auto-draft, but based on personal experience and hearing from others, I like having the control.  Avoid Large Balances The second factor you want to look at is the amount you owe.  While having regular activity on your cards is important, carrying too much debt can make you appear financially strained, so be sure to pay balances quickly. Again, scheduling your payments can help you. If you decide to use credit cards, then make sure after you make the purchase you schedule the payment.  Don’t Immediately Close an Account After You Paid It Off* Related to the amount you owe is your credit utilization ratio – basically how much of your available credit are you using. If your credit utilization is high, your score will be negatively affected. Lenders like to see low ratios of 30% or less. Here’s where a family pursuing financial freedom, you’ll want to veer off this common piece of advice.  Some horrible ‘advice’ I’ve seen includes opening new accounts just so you can raise your score. Don’t do it. Remember we are looking at raising your score without raising more needless risk or temptation. Never spend more money just to build your credit – it’s a losing game. Ideally, you should be paying your balances off each month. Less stress.  Now here’s something to seriously consider when you’re getting a mortgage and going the traditional route with lenders. If you’ve paid off your debt and you’re focused on a higher credit score for your mortgage, then keep the account open. At least until after the mortgage. If you close it, your score can go down, which means your lender will probably offer a higher interest rate.  Once you have your mortgage, you can go ahead and close it. Your score will be affected, but as I’ll talk more about more in a bit, it may not matter. Remember we’re thinking long-term with your finances.  How to Make Your Credit Score an Afterthought So those are the key factors you should be focusing on with raising your credit score.  I do want to mention in terms of giving yourself more options and a bit more freedom is to have a plan to pay off your debts.  Getting rid of your credit card debt can be a huge win as you’re not being sucked into those ridiculous interest rates.   You’ll also put yourself in a position where your credit score isn’t such a big deal.   As you are knocking out your credit debt, car and student loans, and putting extra towards that mortgage, at each step you’ll be less and less dependent on your credit score.  Think about it,  when you’re completely debt-free, how important is your credit score now? Support the Podcast! Thank you so much for listening to the podcast! Spread the word! If you enjoyed this episode and think it can help a buddy get on the path to dumping debt and become financially free, please share. Leave a review. Honest feedback and reviews make a big difference and gets the word out about the podcast. Leave your review on Spotify, or Apple. Grab a copy of Jumpstart Your Marriage and Your Money. My book is designed for a busy couple to set up their finances in 4 weeks. Get tips and tools that have worked for other couples on their journey of building their marriage and wealth together!

Everyone knows having a quality credit score is a critical component for real estate because it is an essential part of borrowing money. In this episode we break down the basics of credit! By the end of this episode you will understand what credit is, why it matters, and how to begin leveraging it. Key Topics: What is Credit? How is Credit measured? The Big Three credit bureaus — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion — keep records of loans for an estimated 200 million U.S. consumers. Credit scores are typically comprised of five major factors:  Payment History = 35 percent  Outstanding Balances = 30 percent  Length of Credit History = 15 percent  Types of Accounts = 10 percent  Credit Inquiries = 10 percent  Score Ranges  Bad Credit: 300 – 600  Poor Credit: 600 – 649  Fair Credit: 650 – 699  Good Credit: 700 – 749 Excellent Credit: 750 – 850 No matter what your credit situation, in real estate, how you leverage it is key! And Still Stay Home! - Kimberly Harris - Content Creator -Eboney Jones - Content Creator - Courtney Harrington - Content Creator - Athenzmedia - Editor - Trac_Muzik - Music Producer --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/realwomenrealestate/support

The basics of credit come down to 6 factors:Hard Inquiries, Total Accounts, Age of Credit History, Derogatory Marks, Credit Utilization and Payment History.Need to start building your credit?Understand the basics and how you can leverage credit and create a foundation allowing you to prosper financially.

Two big mistakes are: 1) Renting out your former primary residence. 2) Only being invested in one market.  This Beginner’s Real Estate Investing Audio Guide also helps you step-by-step with buying an income property: Credit Scoring Mortgage Pre-Approval Writing An Offer Inspection Vetting A Property Manager Appraisal Insurance Closing LLCs  **The entire audio from this episode is transcribed into words and can be found at the end.** People set up LLCs for asset protection, anonymity, or tax purposes. But there is a lot of administrative work. Is it even worth setting up? Your FICO credit score has five ingredients. Down payment, debt-to-income ratio covered. Mortgage pre-approval is better than pre-qualification. Select income property in: job-growth economies, high rent in proportion to low purchase price. Cash flow = Rent Income minus “VIMTUM”. Why would someone sell you a cash-flowing property? “Turnkey” defined. Should you make a lowball offer to a turnkey provider? Also discussed: Negotiation Strategy, Earnest Money, Purchase Contracts, Management Fees, Management Agreements, Mobile Notary, Title Company, Rent-To-Value Ratio, Collecting Cash Flow. __________________ Want more wealth? 1) Grab my FREE E-book and Newsletter at: GetRichEducation.com/Book 2) Your actionable turnkey real estate investing opportunity: GREturnkey.com 3) Read my best-selling paperback: getbook.at/7moneymyths __________________ Resources mentioned: Mortgage Loans: RidgeLendingGroup.com Find Properties: GREturnkey.com Memphis & Little Rock Property: MidSouthHomeBuyers.com Turnkey Real Estate: NoradaRealEstate.com QRP: TotalControlFinancial.com JWB New Construction Turnkey: NewConstructionTurnkey.com Our Tampa Real Estate Field Trip: RealEstateFieldTrip.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold     Complete Audio Transcript:   Welcome to Get Rich Education. I’m your host Keith Weinhold and I’m here to help Beginning Real Estate Investors Today.  The biggest beginner mistakes to avoid, when you make an offer - can you lowball a turnkey provider, and all those buyer steps like LLCs, mortgage pre-approval, inspection, appraisal, and closing. Today, on Get Rich Education. _____________________ Welcome to GRE. This is Get Rich Education Episode 249 - and this is your Beginner’s Real Estate Investing Audio Guide. Hi, I’m your host Keith Weinhold. We’re talking about how to get into long-term buy & hold RE investing - and that’s because it’s the most generationally-proven way to build wealth. First, let’s talk about a couple of the biggest mistakes that real estate investors make - it’s being invested in only one geographic market. Often, that’s the market that they just happen to live in.  There is more risk with being in only one market than most realize, because you’re now tied to the fortunes or misfortunes of just one area’s economy. Another substantial, common real estate investor mistake is that they continue to hold onto one - I’ll call it - special - property in their portfolio that they usually need to get rid of - but they have either sentimental ties to it - or they just hold onto it for convenience, and do you know what that property is? I’m actually talking about a specific property here. It’s the home that THEY YOU USED TO LIVE IN yourself. Well, what’s wrong with renting out the home that you used to live in yourself?  You might still have the preferable owner-occupied financing locked in on that one - and afterall, that’s a better rate than you could get on a non-owner-occupied rental. The problem is that the property probably doesn’t perform BEST as a rental. But you might be clearing, say $500 per month by using your former primary residence as a rental today.  Look, for you, it’s often about the cash flow - and yes, it is about the cash flow.  But there’s something even more important than cash flow - that’s because nearly any property will cash flow if the loan were paid off. That’s why it’s really more specifically about the rent-to-value ratio of a property. If you’re renting out the home that you used to live in, and it wasn’t strategically bought as a rental, if your rent-to-value ratio (or RV ratio) is 0.6%, meaning that for every $100K in value it has, you’re only getting $600 of monthly rent income, then you’re losing cash flow dollars every year - and every month. Look, let’s give a real life example of the .6% RV ratio. Say that you can get $1,800 rent out of that $300K property that you used to live in.  But instead, three $100K homes bought strategically as rentals can have a combined rent income of $3,000. Yes, you can still find that full 1% rent-to-value ratio. So it’s either one $300K property at $1,800 of rent income. Or three $100K properties at $3,000 of rent income.  So you’re losing $1,200 dollars of cash flow every month - you’re only getting $1,800 rather than $3,000 - by not buying and owning strategically in markets in the Midwest and South where the properties make sense as a RENTAL on the day that you buy it. Your primary residence only made sense as a primary residence on the day that you bought it.  Now you can see that the only reason that you own it, is because you defaulted and “fell” into it. Don’t fall into things. Be intentional.  You are a better investor when you’re intentional rather than emotional. It’s even better for you now. Beyond your $1,200 of additional cash flow with some repositioning, now, with three properties instead of one - now you’ve also taken care of the first real estate investor mistake that I mentioned. WITH three rentals rather than one, now you can be diversified across multiple markets. Two birds are killed with one stone. Now with some re-positioning, you’ve increased your cash flow by $1,200, AND you’re in multiple markets. One property isn’t divisible. We’re talking about real estate investing for beginners today, so let me clearly guide you through step-by-step on just how you go about buying your first property - writing an offer, inspection and vetting your Property Manager which is known as due diligence, appraisal, and onto closing and receiving cash flow from the tenant. As you’ll see, much of today’s show pertains to any investment property at all. But we’re talking mostly about how to buy single-family turnkey homes, especially homes outside your home market - as most of the best deals are not found where you live. Like they say, the best investors live where they want to live, invest where the numbers make sense. Get Rich Education is heard in 188 world nations.  Today’s content is primarily geared toward United States real estate investors - but those that live outside the United States will benefit here too. Here’s a question that you might have - “How do I go about setting up an LLC - a Limited Liability Company - to hold my investment property in?”  I’ll tell you - I don’t think “How do I set up an LLC?” is the best question to ask. The best question to ask is, “Should I set up an LLC?”  The three main reasons people set up an LLC are for either anonymity, tax purposes, or asset protection. Now, if you know that you WANT to set up an LLC - I’ve done three episodes on that topic with Rich Dad Legal Advisor Garrett Sutton. You can go to GetRichEducation.com, type “Garrett Sutton” in the search bar, and those three episode numbers will appear so that you can listen. But the reason that the question is, “Should I even SET up an LLC?” is because: Setup of LLCs complicates your life. Maintaining a registered agent, Articles Of Incorporation, having separate accounts, tracking expenses with separate credit cards, paying annual fees for everything - depending on how many LLCs you have and how you structure your life - it can wear you out.   The second reason you should ask yourself, “Should I even set up an LLC?” is because you might not have many assets for a litigant to go after. Retirement accounts have certain protections already. Equity in a property could be low-hanging fruit for a plaintiff attorney if someone gets a judgement against you. But since the Return From Equity is always zero, what would you have much equity in a property anyway?   The third reason you should ask yourself, “Why should I even set up an LLC?” is that frivolous or slip-and-fall type of lawsuits are rare. Not only have I never been a party to one, I’ve never even heard of any investor friend or associate having one - and I talk to a lot of people. You probably haven’t heard of one either.   Now, note that I’m not saying you can’t get an LLC or shouldn’t get one. I’m saying, prioritize those questions to yourself. First, it’s “Should I get one?”. If that’s a definitive “yes”, only THEN ask: “How do I set one up?” Why do you think you have to? Did some attorney use fear tactics to get you to? If the result of the LLC’s administrative overburden provides a greater reward in the form of asset protection, anonymity, or tax benefit - which is typically a flow-through taxation type anyway, you might then … get an LLC. So, as a beginning real estate investor, understand that real estate is a credit-based asset - meaning it’s usually bought with a loan.  So let’s talk about getting your finances in order before you contact a lender or select an income property.  That begins with you having enough cash liquidated for a 20% down payment on the property - add about 4% for closing costs, depending on the state that you’re buying your property in - and on the lowest-priced property that’s still in a decent area of a low-cost city - which might be a $60,000 property … 24% of that then is about $14,000 that you’ll need. You should have some extra on top of that as reserves.  Now, let’s look at another part of your finances - your DTI - your debt-to-income ratio. It cannot exceed 43% to 45% - maybe up to 50% in some circumstances.  So if your monthly minimum debt payments - everywhere in your life - housing payment, minimum credit card payments, minimum car payment - if that sum is $5,000 and your gross monthly income is $10,000 - that’s a 50% DTI. You can’t exceed that. Of course, before a bank is willing to loan you money, they want to have a reasonable assurance that you aren’t weighed down with debt elsewhere because their fear factor goes up that they won’t get paid back. Next, let’s talk about your credit score. We dedicated an entire episode to this back in Episode 54. If you can remember back that far, Philip Tirone was here with us and you learned more about credit scores that you probably ever thought you would … … and he even went on to call the credit scoring system a total scam. He was quite opinionated - it was interesting and eye-opening, but ...  Playing within the scam here - as it might be.  There are many different credit scoring models, but the FICO Score - F-I-C-O - is a respected one that you’re probably going to see your mortgage lender use. It stands for Fair Isaac Company. Their credit scoring range is 300 - the worst, up to 850. 850 is essentially a perfect score. Importantly, 740 is the highest score that helps you here.  If you have a 782 or an 836, it doesn’t help you qualify for the loan or get you a lower mortgage interest rate or anything else.  740 is where you’re optimized.  Now, just a quick overview of FICO credit scoring ... There are five primary ingredients that make up your credit score. In order of importance, they are your payment history, amounts owed, length of your credit history, new credit, and finally credit mix.  That first one, Payment History, is the most heavily weighted one. It’s 35% of your score. As you might expect, the repayment of past debt is a major factor in the calculation of credit scores. It helps determine your future long-term payment behavior. Both revolving credit (i.e. credit cards) and installment loans (i.e. mortgage) are included in payment history calculations.  Although installment loans like mortgages take a bit more precedence over revolving credit - like credit cards.  This is why one of the best ways to improve or maintain a good score is to make consistent, on-time payments. The next way, your Amounts Owed – 30% This category is basically credit utilization or the percentage of available credit being used - or borrowed against. Credit score formulas “see” borrowers who constantly reach or exceed their credit limit as a potential risk. That is why it’s a good idea to keep low credit card balances and not overextend your credit utilization ratio. So if you’ve got just a $1,000 balance on a credit card with a $10,000 credit limit, that’s seen as a good ratio. You’re staying well within your limits then.  The third FICO credit score ingredient is the Length of your Credit History – 15% This factor is based on the length of time all credit accounts have been open. It also includes the timeframe since an account’s most recent transaction.  Newer credit users could have a more difficult time achieving a high score than those who have a long credit history. That’s because if you have a longer credit history, FICO has more data on which to base their payment history. The fourth of five FICO ingredients is your “Credit Mix” – Now we’re down to an ingredient only comprising 10% of your score. Credit mix just means that it helps your score if you have a combination of credit cards, retail accounts, installment loans, finance company accounts and mortgage loans.  Finally, “New Credit” makes up the last 10% of your FICO score. Don’t open too many new credit accounts in a short period of time. That signifies a greater risk to lenders – and that’s especially true for you if you’re a borrower with a short credit history.  And you sure don’t want to open up any new lines of credit, down the road when you’re in the qualification process for buying a new property unless you check with your Mortgage Loan officer first. Knowing what factors make up your FICO® Credit Score can help you qualify for more loans and get better mortgage interest rates. That’s the bottom line. This helps you get pre-qualifed or pre-approved with your Mortgage Lender. To get prequalified, you just need to provide some financial information to your mortgage lender, such as your income and the amount of savings and investments you have. Your lender will review this information and tell you how much they can lend you.  After pre-qualification, you can seek the higher-level status and that is getting pre-APPROVAL for credit. Pre-approval is better than pre-qualification. If you think about it, it makes sense. Qualifying for anything in life is not as good as getting approved for something - I suppose.  Pre-approval involves providing your more detailed financial documents - like W-2 statements, paycheck stubs, bank account statements, and your previous two years tax returns. This way, your lender can VERIFY your financial status and credit. Now that you’re pre-approved with a lender, you can focus on the market and property that you’re interested in.  RidgeLendingGroup.com is the mortgage lender that we recommend most often because they SPECIALIZE in income property. They don’t have any seasoning requirements. Seasoning means that the person selling YOU the property needs to have held onto it for a certain length of time - or the lender won’t finance the property for you. While you’re in the pre-approval process, you can be learning about a cash-flowing investment market.  You want to pick a geographic metro market that typically has low-cost properties, and high rent incomes in proportion to those low costs.  In fact, the market is more important than the property. Because your income comes from your tenant, and your tenant’s income comes from a job. So you typically don’t want to own much property in a town with 14,000 people that’s an outlying area - not part of a greater metro - where 1/3rd of the employment is tied to one tungsten factory or even one semiconductor manufacturer. Because now, too much of your income stream is tied to just one industry. You also don’t want to buy slummy property. Those tenants often don’t pay the rent. You also don’t want to buy the median-priced home or higher, because the numbers don’t work out. So you want that working class housing that’s just below the median price point for the area. If you’re not already confident about that and familiar with the right provider ...  We have information on the right market, with the right provider, with properties - and they’re typically in the MidWest and South - at GREturnkey.com.  So read a market report there. That’s good, pointed information. Most investors are interested in a property for the production of cash flow. That’s the margin by which your rent income exceeds all expenses. Rent income minus expenses should be a positive number. So that’s your monthly rent minus VIMTUM. V-I-M-T-U-M.  Vacancy, Insurance, Maintenance, Taxes, Utilities, and Management. I like easy ways to remember things and VIMTUM is an easy way to remember. So, you’re listening to the Beginner’s Real Estate Investing Audio Guide here as a regular episode of Get Rich Education. If you’re not a beginner & you’re still listening, it’s either a good review and you might even be learning some new things along the way yourself.  Including, should you ever lowball a turnkey provider and a negotiation approach that I have for that - in a few minutes.  But first, one reasonable beginner question is ...   “Now why would someone would want to sell me a cash-flowing property in the first place? Why would someone sell me a good thing that pays them every month that they could continue to hold onto for cash flow? If a property pays someone every month while they hold onto it - why in the heck would they sell it to me? OK, some seller out there has a golden goose that lays a golden egg every month, so why in the world would they give me an opportunity to buy the goose? Well, there are just so many reasons for selling cash-flowing property - yes, a ton of reasons for selling even a young, healthy goose that lays golden eggs every month & is expected to so for years. Well, a turnkey provider runs out of money too. They can’t buy all the properties themselves.  They’d prefer a lump sum payout when they sell this property, because their business model is to go pay all cash for another distressed property that they can fix up.  And if you think that they snatched up the good ones themselves a while ago - yeah, they probably did do some of that. In fact - I WANT them to have snatched up some good properties from their own market earlier. It shows me that they believe in what they sell. Now, other reasons that the - I guess general public seller might want to sell you a property is ... One reason is moving. Say that a family in City A owns a few mom-and-pop rental homes that they self-manage and they’re moving to City B in another state, they’ll often sell their income properties. Some people want to self-manage their property (often because they never explored their best-and-highest use, but anyway) & if they have to move to City B, they’ll sell the property rather than try to find a Property Manager in City A.  Another reason people sell cash-flowing property is that - even if someone is not moving, that person might be tired of the self-management hassle - but yet they don’t try professional management - because that person has the DIYer mentality - that soooo common do-it-yourself mindset. OK, most people just don’t take a strategic approach to real estate investing. Other reasons for people selling cash-flowing property are death, marriage, divorce, and all kinds of either joyous or tragic life milestones. If a husband-and-wife own rental properties but running & managing them was kind of the husband’s thing & the husband dies … the wife doesn’t know how to run the properties & she’s likely to sell rather than hire a Property Manager. People may sell their cash-flowing property in case of all kinds of emergencies - medical and otherwise - because they may need a quick lump of cash - instead of the steady stream of cash flow over time that just won’t work for them in their new situation. OK, most of those situations involve some sort of external life change for property sellers - a lot of them tragic. Well - here’s a personal one for you...  A few years ago, I sold two cash-flowing apartment buildings at the same time - well, those sales actually closed on consecutive days - so nearly the same time. Both of those cash-flowing apartment buildings that I sold were 100% occupied with tenants, I had competent management in place, and there were no deferred maintenance issues with the buildings. You want to know my reason for selling two nice golden apartment gooses that were steadily laying some nice golden eggs? OK...can you guess why?  Alright, fortunately I didn't have any distress or emergency in my life. ...oh, and also, I wanted to sell them fast too, I couldn’t let these two cash-flowing apartment buildings linger on the market for a while. I really wanted to get rid of them. I had no distress like those situations I mentioned earlier. So can you guess why I wanted to sell these long-producing golden gooses in a good job growth market that produced nice cash flow, nice golden eggs? I’ll tell you why. That's because I knew I could 1031 Exchange those two gooses for two even larger gooses. Now I won’t get into the 1031 here on a beginner episode.  But I replaced the two smaller apartment buildings with two larger apartment buildings that would produce even larger eggs if I did it with a quick timeline - and I could defer any tax on my profitable gain.  I found - I guess - two very fertile egg producers that were going to produce even more cash flow over time. So...I think you get the message here. To the buyers of my smaller apartment buildings, I appeared as a very motivated seller of cash-flowing property, even though I had no external stress in my life.  It was due to internal reasons that I wanted to sell...and it’s the internal drive to expand my income.  No shrinking thinking here at Get Rich Education. Now, when you’ve found a cash-flowing property that you want to buy, should you make a lowball offer to a turnkey provider? My definition of lowball here, is, a 10% discount.  We’ll say, that a provider is offering a property for $120,000 - then you’d make the offer for 10% less, which is $108,000. That’s a lowball. My answer is ...  No. That’s not going to work. In almost every instance, that’s too much of a discount and it’s going to eat their margin too much.  Depending on how it’s presented, a seller might even be less motivated to work with you if they get a lowball offer.  This company has a business to run and with a turnkey property, you’re typically paying for the convenience. You leveraged their systems of them delivering this product to you that’s already renovated, rehabilitated, tenanted, and under management.  Now, can you can knock off $1K-$2K? And say, offer the seller then - $118K or $119K for the $120,000 property. Yeah, that might work.  It sure wouldn’t be deemed some unreasonable request. But it’s good to at least provide a reason - some rationale - in asking for the discount. Let me give you some perspective on this negotiation too.  For every $1,000 less in a mortgage loan that you take out, how much do you think that saves you in a monthly payment? Did you ever figure out how much that saves you? Well, at a 5% interest rate on a 30-year loan, reducing your mortgage loan amount by $1,000 saves you … $5. Five bucks in a reduced payment.  For more perspective, keep in mind too, that once the seller accepts your offer - it’s only the first part of the negotiation. Later, it’s a negotiation with the inspection. We’ll discuss how to navigate THAT shortly. I’m Keith Weinhold. You’re listening to Get Rich Education. ________________   Welcome back to Get Rich Education. This is your Beginner’s Guide to Real Estate Investing. I’m your host, Keith Weinhold and we’re talking about buying an income-producing property.   That may or may not be a TURNKEY property - which just means that it’s already renovated, tenanted, and under management with a tenant on the day that you buy it.    Now, once your offer is accepted by the seller, I want to give you - really just a brief outline of what to expect next.    This isn’t intended to give you every step in exhaustive detail, but this is generally what comes next for United States real estate purchases, and custom varies somewhat from state-to-state.   So with that in mind, once the turnkey provider or seller accepts your purchase offer...   You need to send in your earnest money. Earnest money is not the down payment. It’s a smaller amount that shows good faith that you’re serious about your offer.    It’s often an amount of $5,000 or less and it shows the seller that you’re serious enough about buying the property that the seller has the confidence to take their property OFF the market and not show it to anyone else.   The seller should give you instructions on how to place your Earnest Money.    Now remember, your earnest money deposit is not going directly TO the seller, it is going to a third-party escrow account, and it is refundable to you in accordance with the terms of the contract you signed.   Your contract should have an estimated closing date in there. I want to emphasize that the key word there is “estimated”.    While it is important that all parties work towards closing by this date, between you and me - let’s just be realistic - the reality is that many transactions get delayed beyond the closing date in the contract for a variety of reasons on the seller side, sometimes having to do with construction or renovation delays.    If this happens, it is nothing to be worried about, just remain in touch with the seller and you can simply sign a contract extension if needed when the time comes.   As you are financing your property, be sure to keep getting your lender anything that they ask you for up so that they can keep processing your loan.    As your closing gets near, they will probably ask you for some updated information and have some final stipulations from the underwriter, so just remain in close touch with your lender and try to provide them what they need as swiftly as you can.   During most of this time where you’re under contract & even before you’re in-contract to buy the property, most of your relationship with your lender and seller is just sitting around, waiting for the next stage.    Once construction/renovation is completed on your property, I suggest that you order a professional home inspection before closing.    As the buyer, this is at your expense, but the home inspection is cheap insurance for you and it is an important part of your due diligence. It might cost you about $300 for a single-family turnkey income property.   A four-plex inspection might cost up toward $800.   When seeking an inspector - seek ASHI certification - that is American Society of Home Inspectors.   You’re looking for an inspector with a good reputation, licensed and bonded. It is good to look for a level of experience as well. The choice is really yours as the Buyer.   Your inspector points out deficiencies in what I’ll break into a few categories.    #1 is Major concerns – these are significantly defective, safety issues that require immediate repair. Often times, those things MUST be done in order for your lender to even finance the property so the seller is going to do those things for you. That might be adding a railing to a porch.   The second category are recommended repairs – So they’re recommended but not required. That might be adding some extra insulation in the attic.    The third category is “nice if it were done” - like a kitchen cabinet door that’s a little loose and doesn’t close snugly.   When you get your home inspection report back because the inspector has compiled their findings, the key to remember is that the inspector will ALWAYS return a (usually long) list of items that they recommend be corrected prior to closing.    Now, this even happens on new construction, so expect some findings.   And remember, you are not closing on the property in the condition it was inspected. Rather, the inspection is just part of the process on the path to getting the property to its final condition.    Then you and the seller agree on what will be fixed (at the sellers expense, and verified to your satisfaction), prior to closing.    The seller is anticipating that they will need to make some final repairs (at their own expense) after they get the inspection repair request from you. This is all part of the normal process.   Of course, you can get in a car or hop on a plane and visit the turnkey property yourself and walk the property with your inspector, but I’d say fewer than 10% of turnkey buyers do this.    But going to see the property in person is never a BAD idea.   Today, it’s easier than ever for an inspector or provider to e-mail you a property video. The report that you get from your Home Inspector after he visited the home will have lots of photos and details.   Typically, purchase offers are contingent on a home inspection of the property to check for signs of structural damage or things that may need fixing.  This contingency protects you by giving you a chance to renegotiate your offer or withdraw it without penalty if the inspection reveals significant material damage. Once the seller makes any needed repairs that the third-party inspector found, I suggest having a re-inspection done by that same inspector. This gives you the chance to confirm that any agreed-upon repairs have indeed been made. You might spend another $100 on this re-inspection. Now, if the original inspection showed that a leaky faucet needed to be replaced, and the seller said they’d do it, and the re-inspection finds that that work wasn’t done as promised, then any FURTHER re-inspection costs are often a cost borne by the seller. Which seems pretty fair - they said they’d do work - and the re-inspection that you paid for confirmed that it hadn’t been done in this case. Now, back to the negotiation. If you asked for a reduced Purchase Price, that could lean away from you asking for too much in the inspection.   How do I like to play it? Often times, I make a full price offer for the property - and I might even let the seller know at that time that I’d like to give you your price - it’s a full $120,000 in this case - and since you got your price, I’d like my terms.   My terms are - that I’m more bold in what I request the seller to do from the inspection findings.  Maybe I will ask them to add that extra insulation in the attic as one of those “Recommended buy not Required For Financing” items - or replace a window pane that had condensation inside it.   Then, what’s my justification for asking the seller for that. It’s that I’m paying your full price. Again, financing an extra $1,000 only costs me $5 per month.   Now, let’s talk about the property appraisal.    The appraisal is a tool that the bank uses to verify the quality of their collateral.    Because in your loan paperwork, at closing, the bank will basically tell you that if you don’t make your monthly payments, you’ll be foreclosed upon and the bank will take back the property - that’s their collateral.   So they want to make sure that the property seems to be worth as much or more than you’re in contract for - that $120,000 in our example.   Your lender is the one that orders the property appraisal, not you. In about 90% of U.S. states, you as the buyer pay for the appraisal. It costs up to about $500.    The appraiser is a member of a third-party company and is not directly associated with the lender. It wasn’t always that way.    In fact, one factor that led to the housing downturn of 2007 in the Great Recession is that some lenders & appraisers were “in cahoots”. Haha! That can’t happen anymore.    BTW, the appraisal and some of these other steps are all part of your closing costs. All part of that … about 4% of the property purchase price.   The appraisal is typically done by a certified appraiser physically visiting the home - and these people always seemingly have a tape measure with them.   The appraiser checks out the premises and their job is to use market comparables to make sure that the lender has adequate collateral in case you, the borrower, default.   OK, the bank doesn’t want to lend out more than the property is worth or else they could find themselves underwater if the borrower defaults. The appraisal protects against this.   And don’t confuse this appraisal with an assessment. An assessment is something that a county or municipality uses the measure the amount of property taxes that are paid. It’s really unrelated to this appraisal.   Now, before you select your Property Manager, I’d really like for you to talk with them on the phone or use a free video chat service like Zoom - it’s Zoom.us - it works a lot like Skype but Zoom is easier to use.   I mean, I don’t make many phone calls in my life anymore - much like a lot of people. But I want you to have a phone or video call with your PM because ...   I want you to have a good vibe - a good feeling about your property manager and to vet that manager just like you would vet out a manager for a non-turnkey company.   Just because a property is branded “turnkey” by a company, doesn’t mean that you can dismiss doing your due diligence. Turnkey can be a great system, but there’s nothing magical about that word alone.   Don’t overlook developing a good feeling about your Property Manager, because this is the one long-term relationship that you expect to have. I just can’t emphasize that enough. Your Manager is one of your key team members.   They’ll tell you the character of the current tenant that’s currently in the home. Find out how the manager is going to pay you. Feel them out, know what your communication flow is going to be like.    If they’re part of the same company, a good manager should also connect you with whom renovated your turnkey property in case you have some questions for them.   Now, notice that I haven’t mentioned a real estate agent. Most turnkey providers work in a direct model so that you don’t have to go through agents.   You must sign a written Management Agreement with your Property Manager.    This gives the manager written authority to manage your property for you, it will state their fees, and you’ll have your contact information in that agreement.   There are typically two fees - a leasing fee and a management fee.   A leasing fee is where you’ll spend ½ month’s rent to one month’s rent amount when the Manager screens a new tenant. So hopefully that only happens every 1 or 2 or even 5 years if you’re lucky.    Yes, you can typically approve or reject their selected prospective tenant. You are going to be the owner of the property afterall.   A management fee is often 8-10% of one month’s rent income - and that’s what you pay monthly - ongoing.   You can sign a Management Agreement with the property provider if they have management integrated in-house. If not, you can lean on your provider for some management recommendations.   Now, there’s one blank to fill in on your Management Agreement - it’s a dollar amount up to which the manager can pay for expenses that come up - against your account - without contacting you.    For example, if the number $500 is written in there, that means that if a maintenance or repair expense on your property exceeds $500, they must contact you prior to incurring that expense.   You get to choose that dollar limit. As a beginning real estate investor, go with a lower figure.    Then as you get comfortable and / or you don’t want to be bothered about the property as much, you can increase that dollar limit in which they need to contract you about approving maintenance or repairs.   Basically, if there’s something that has to do with the property & you don’t want to deal with it, then make sure it’s written in the Management Agreement that the manager will perform it.   Typically, it’s going to say that the manager will collect rent, handle tenant relations, respond to repair requests, send you the rent, keep your ledger of income & expenses on the property, post legal notices if a tenant is paying the rent late, and sooo many other associated duties that I personally don’t want to deal with. I just want to live my life.   Get that Management Agreement done - fully executed - signed by both you & the Manager BEFORE you close on the property.    Before you close, you can buy property insurance from any provider you choose.    Your turnkey provider is often happy to recommend some providers that their other clients have used in this market, or you can just Google and find your own.    Be sure to let the insurance provider know that this is a rental property (not a primary residence where you live and not a second home).    Most turnkey buyers purchase both hazard and liability insurance as part of their policy. Like any other insurance policy, you will have choices about deductibles, monthly payments, and coverage amounts.    If you are financing your property, your lender will most likely be able to combine your property taxes and insurance into your monthly payment, so you have one monthly payment for principal, interest, taxes and insurance (PITI) … much like you would on your primary residence.   The financing process typically takes about 30 days from the time you submit your EM.    Remember that YOU are a factor in how fast your property closes. If that lender needs another document, give it to them pretty promptly.   When you have finalized your due diligence, and verified that the seller has made all the agreed upon repairs from the home inspection report, you will be ready to close.    You likely live in a different state than the property and will close remotely. The title company (or its a closing attorney in some states) will prepare your closing documents - including your loan docs...    ...and can arrange for a mobile notary to meet you with the docs wherever you choose (your home, your office, your local coffee shop, etc.) so you can sign the docs in front of a notary who will then overnight the docs back to the Title Company so the transaction can fund.   Your lender will arrange for a title company to handle all of the paperwork and make sure that the seller is the rightful owner of the house you are buying.   It may seem like the closing process is a lot of work, but you’ll really spend most of the time waiting. Most of the time, you'll just be sitting on your hands, waiting for someone else involved in the transaction to come through.    So find something enjoyable to occupy your time and distract you while you wait, and feel secure in the knowledge that you've done your research and know how to make your closing process go smoothly.   When you complete that closing with the mobile notary - I’ve done these closings at my home’s dining room table, or even in my employer’s conference room back when I used to have a day job - then, hey!    You need to congratulate yourself on adding another income property to your portfolio.   You know, the good news is that of all of these stages we’ve discussed - the longest stage of them all is your ownership of the property. You Own & Collect the cash flow.   And hey, this isn’t reason enough alone - but it’s kinda cool that you own property in TN and FL and IN.  You own part of each one of those states.    And with each new turnkey property you buy, you might have just increased your mostly passive cash flow by $311 per month or $118 per month or whatever it is.   If you can swing it, it can be more efficient timewise for you to buy more than one property at a time.   As you buy more income properties, it not only gets easier because you know the process, but you often get quantity discounts.   For example, a management company might charge you a 9% management fee on your first three properties, but once you own four or more, they might charge you 8% on all four rather than 9%.   Insurance companies often have similar discounts for you….so you may very well get a little more profitable as you buy more property.   A rent-to-value ratio of 1% is generally quite desirable, meaning one month’s rent is 1% or more of the purchase price.   For example, a $120,000 property and a rent income of $1,200.    $1,000 rent income on a $120,000 property would probably work fairly well too.   You typically want to avoid properties with RV ratios of less than 7/10ths of 1%, or 0.75.    Let’s keep in mind that the RV ratio is only a rule of thumb. It doesn’t account for a major recurring expense like property taxes.   In high property tax jurisdictions like many Texas markets, you probably want that RV ratio up higher.   Now, as a beginning real estate investor, or even an advanced one, don’t worry about not know it ALL. No one’s ever going to know it all with real estate.   In fact, I’ve been actively investing in real estate since 2002 and just within the steps of ACQUIRING a property, like I carefully discussed today, some incremental half-step will come up in the process that I hadn’t been thinking about previously - like signing a Lead Paint Disclosure Form.   So, you don’t need to commit all of this stuff to memory.   Now, something that novice real estate investors say sometimes is something like: “I would only buy an income property that I would live in myself.”    I contend that that is an awful criterion upon which to found strategic fundamentals on purchasing an income property.   Once one filters property that way, they have let their emotions trump facts.    If the fact that a clean, safe, affordable, and functional property has a good occupancy rate in a sound employment market, decent ENOUGH neighborhood, and the numbers make sense - that’s more important.   OK, you aren’t living there yourself so it’s not a sound criterion.   Shoot, if I moved into any income property that I own, my lifestyle would take a substantial hit. Yet I’m not a slumlord - I provide housing that’s clean, safe, affordable and functional.   But they’re not replete with fantastic amenities, it does not have Corinthian architecture with alabaster columns - OK - but I know there’s a demographic for my rental property type that demands this responsible-but-no-frills housing over time.   It’s about asking yourself a better question, like, “Will this property secure an income stream?”    Alright, would you rather have your property look “cute as a button” - or secure an income stream?   OK, we’re investors here.   Some think that in today’s electronic age, you should be able to complete a property purchase from the time you write an offer until you close on a property in the same-day.    Well, that’s certainly not true. As you witnessed, physical things need to take place because you’re buying a real, physical asset.   We’ve been talking today about how you buy an income property - just simply that - especially as it pertains to buying an out-of-state turnkey income property - from the time that you get a property under contract and submit the earnest money to escrow all the way to closing.   ...because that’s how to generate passive income, which in turn, creates a rich life for you.   Again, this isn’t an all-encompassing guide today with EVERY little detail. But we’ve hit the major milestones in the process & more.   You’ve got a good general guide on the income property-buying structure.    You might have learned something about prioritization - perhaps LLCs matter less than you thought and a communicative Property Manager matters more than you thought.   Today’s show has the type of content that will be about as relevant 5 years from now as it does today.    Now, today is also evidence that real estate does not have the liquidity that some other investments do. It takes longer to get in & get out.   However, that low liquidity actually contributes to relative price stability in real estate. OK, there’s no panic selling in real estate.   Maybe the most important thing for you to keep in mind is that...   You cannot make any money from the property that you don’t own.   Your future depends on what you do today.   To “know” something and not “do” something is to really not know something.   The most important thing you can do is act...because you cannot make any money from the property that you don’t own.   Again, a recommended, specific INCOME property lender is Ridge Lending Group. Our network of income property providers is at GREturnkey.com   And one particular property provider to highlight over there is Memphis, Tennessee’s Mid South Home Buyers. Not only are they great with beginners, but they have profitable properties at lower price points, which some beginners would rather start with.   MidSouth Home Buyers has been rather popular for all those reasons and that’s created a longer wait list. Well, the news is that MidSouth Home Buyers has just expanded into another great investment market - Little Rock, Arkansas.   So that should help shorten their wait list.   If you can’t remember those three resources - Ridge Lending Group for the loan, GREturnkey and MidSouthHomeBuyers for the properties, I’ll be sure that they’re the first three links in the “Resources Mentioned” portion of the Show Notes accompany this episode.   There would be nothing worse than for me to share today’s knowledge with you - then not let you know where to go to act upon that knowledge.     It’s been my pleasure to bring you your Beginner’s Real Estate Investing Audio Guide today. If you got value from today’s show, I’d be grateful if you took a screenshot of the podcast player image here on your podcatcher …   ...and posted it to your Social Media account - your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn - and let your social friends know that if they’re ever interested in real estate investing, this episode is a great place to start.    Next week, I’ll talk about how you Retain your tenants at the same time you RAISE the rent.    I’m your host, Keith Weinhold. Don’t Quit Your Daydream!   

You may have heard of credit scores before but do you know what a credit score really is? On top of that, how exactly is a credit score determined? And does anyone other than me really care what my credit score is anyway?Credit Score 101Your credit score is a statistical number that is used to evaluate a consumer's creditworthiness aka how likely you are to pay debts back on time and in full without anyone having to twist your arm.Credit scores range from 300 to 850. The higher your score, the more financially trustworthy a person is considered to be. But use caution: just because you have a high credit score today doesn't mean you'll necessarily have a high credit score or even the same credit score a month from now. That's because your credit score is like a living, breathing number constantly adjusting to your financial behaviors.That's because your credit score is determined by five (5) main factors. They are:Payment History (35%)Are you paying your bills on time every month?Have you ever been delinquent?Were your delinquencies reported to the credit bureaus?Debt-to-Credit Ratio or Amounts Owed (30%)Are you utilizing more than 30% of your credit limit per credit card?Are you utilizing more than 30% of your total credit limit?Using more than 30% of your available credit, whether that be total limit or per card, can have a negative impact on your credit. Length of Credit (15%)How long have you had access to credit?The older your credit history, the better - it shows your ability to pay on time over a longer period of time and that creditors continue to find you trustworthy to lend to.New Credit (10%)How frequently are you looking for additional lines of credit? Experts recommend applying for new or additional lines of credit once every 12 months. Any more and your credit may take a bigger hit. Credit Mix (10%)Having different types of credit such as installment loans like a mortgage and revolving credit like a credit card can illustrate your ability to handle diverse types of financial debts. Who cares about my credit score?Unless you're in the market for a new credit card, a home, or a car, chances are you may not care about your credit score, but that doesn't mean no one else does. Those that may review your credit score include:CreditorsStudent Loan ProvidersUtility CompaniesInsurance CompaniesLandlordsEmployersCollection AgenciesGovernment AgenciesCourtsWhere to find my credit score?Order a free copy of your credit report from Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion each year and review it for errors by visiting AnnualCreditReport.com. Comments, questions or suggestions for the show? Email us at talkwealthpodcast@gmail.com.To learn more about DebtWave Credit Counseling, visit our website or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.To learn more about the San Diego Financial Literacy Center, visit our website or connect with us on

Payment history makes up 35% of your credit score. It is widely considered the most important aspect of your credit report. You do not want a 30,60,90,120, or 150 day late account on your credit report. It will ruin your credit score.

The most important number when it comes to your personal finances is your credit score. It is next to impossible to build wealth with a poor score because you will be paying MORE for everything around you. Just like school, everyone has a credit score, here is the breakdown: 800 to 900 = A+ 720 to 799= A 650 to 719= B 600 to 649= C 300 to 599= Needs Improvement If you do NOT know your credit score, GO FIND it out! There are several free options online, we at Enriched Academy have partnered up with Transunion, so be sure to check them out. Here is a breakdown of the most important aspects of your credit score: Payment History: 35% Amount Owed: 30% (remember to spend less than 35% of your credit limit) Length Of Credit History: 10% New Credit Applications 10% Type Of Credit Used: 10% If this was helpful you could return the favour by taking 3 seconds out of your day to leave me a review :) It means the world to me.

We received a simple question from a listener that turned into a long conversation about CELL PHONE payment history and credit reports. Can you report your good payment history to your credit reports? Listen to this episode and find out! We also discuss inquiries, and if they can be removed from your credit report if a creditor does not have written permission to pull your credit. A very interesting discussion takes place about finding bad info on the internet, and a perfect example is given on the show. Thanks for listening! In this episode we break it down bit by bit, just for YOU! ALSO!!!*****Special ALERT****  We are giving away a FREE, FREEEE CREDIT REPAIR program to one of our listeners. The catch? Allow us to document the journey to share with our listeners. Of course keeping certain personal information private, we just want to share a bit of the credit repair process with everybody. We think it woud be awesome to have a listener on the show sharing their credit repair journey. Send us an email at TheExtraCreditShow@gmail.com so we can set up a credit review and determine if your case is a good fit for our credit repair process.  SUBMIT YOUR QUESTIONS TO US: theExtracreditshow@gmail.com Share this episode with everyone you know that will benefit from it. The Extra Credit Show is a show hosted by Ex-Debt Collection Agency Executive and Consumer Credit Expert Anselmo Moreno and his business partner Richard David. They have been in the consumer credit consulting and credit repair business since 2005. They often found themselves talking to each other about the current state of consumer credit, debt, credit bureaus etc. - take a listen to the minds of two passionate long time credit repair experts. Available on Itunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and everywhere Podcasts are found. Instagram: @TheExtraCreditShow Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheExtraCreditShow Web: www.TheExtraCreditShow.com Watch the show on YouTube : https://youtu.be/RVq0jCjwpxY Contact: TheExtraCreditShow@gmail.com

In this Episode, we will talk about ... * Their Financial Standing. * And for an Existing Tenant. * Confirm their Payment History. * What about Personal Guarantees? THE NEXT PODCAST will help you determine Your True Net Income.

Typically, people dealing with foreclosure, bankruptcy or short sales are concerned about the impact those things may have on their credit. We focus on taking the mystery out of your credit score, so that you can focus on eliminating the potential liability to the creditor. However, understanding what makes up a credit score will help when facing foreclosure, bankruptcy or short sales, even though credit does recover quickly. The five factors are: Payment History - 35% Credit Utilization - 30% Length of Credit History - 15% Credit Mix - 10% New Credit - 10% We discuss these factors in detail in this week's episode of the podcast. If you have questions we can answer in future episodes, please contact us at Shawn@Yesnerlaw.com or www.yesnerlaw.com.  

#33: Steve Ely, CEO of eCredable, used to work for Equifax running the Direct Consumer Business. One of the challenges he experienced was they had a very limited scope in terms of how they could help consumers. Consumers really wanted help with financial advice or with their credit file but that was not what they were there for. Their primary business was to serve companies, not consumers. He left that company to become CEO of a company that does serve consumers and individuals. Introducing eCredable.com! A service that helps individuals build a true picture of their payment history that every creditor must take into consideration when they use other credit related information to determine your credit worthiness. What is the difference between traditional credit score lending and eCredable? FICO score: A numerical score based upon Amounts Owed (debt), Credit History (from debt products), New Credit (new debt), Type of Credit (debt), and Payment History (on the debt). In summary, borrow a lot of money and pay interest regularly over a long period of time and you will have a great credit score, allowing you to borrow more money, get lots of credit offers in the mail, and be a target for identity theft. eCredable AMP (All My Payments) Credit Rating: An A - F grade of your true payment history, NOT JUST PAYMENTS MADE ON DEBT PRODUCTS. Your electric bill, rent payment, daycare tuition, the month-to-month type bills most of us have that are never factored into a FICO score. If you have debt, your current payments are taken into consideration when you include that in your eCredable profile. Who can eCredable help that FICO doesn't? Graduates: Starting out their adult life as an individual with bad credit or no credit. Ever try to get a cell phone without a credit history? Ever been turned down for an apartment because of your credit score? Get past dummy lending (getting approval from a FICO score) by showing your AMP Credit Report. Immigrants: Why would you come to this country only to learn you have to incur debt in order to "build their credit"? Individuals that are here legally and don't have a traditional credit history can show that they have a good payment history with eCredable's AMP Report. They can apply for bank accounts, get better rates on car payments (which I don't recommend), even use it when applying for a job with a company who looks at your credit score. People who had bad credit and just can't wait for their FICO score to improve: Why wait for your credit score to "heal"? Use the eCredable Report to get better terms or interest rates when lenders Debt-free lifestyles: Continue to pay the light bill, phone bill, even child care and you will likely qualify for the best rates on car insurance and mortgage rates - even when you have a zero credit score. Build your AMP Credit Report To build your own AMP Credit report, sign up by going to