5 Ways To Improve Your Client's Credit Worthiness
As a mortgage or real estate professional, you’re probably aware that most consumers don’t feel comfortable discussing their credit, and are often surprised when a credit report is pulled for them. The surprise is sometimes not pleasant, leaving a lot of people feeling hesitant to start the home buying process. Fortunately, we have a few ways that you can improve your client’s credit worthiness.
Utilize Credit Monitoring: These days, you can monitor your credit from just about anywhere. I personally have received three notifications just this morning about deep web searches and credit score changes. If you have a client that is working towards healthy credit, having more transparent access to seeing a credit report will help. Just make sure they don’t get lost in the confusion of credit scoring. Content is key, and the healthier the content, the healthier the credit score.
Identify The Low Hanging Fruit: Most consumers have easy solutions to their credit challenges. Whether it’s a misreporting account and a credit card that needs to be paid down, look for accounts that can be fixed, paid down, or resolved within a 30-45 day period of time. With one in four consumers facing material errors on their credit report, you may be overlooking easy solutions to help your client credit qualify.
Encourage Vigilance: Some clients don’t have an easy road ahead of them. Dealing with credit challenges can be difficult. Encourage your clients to be vigilant as they work to resolve derogatory accounts. Dealing with creditors, collection agencies, and even credit repair can cause gray hairs, and it takes vigilance to see their way through it to the end.
Set A Plan: No that your client has credit monitoring, understands which accounts to work on first (low hanging fruit), and is amped up to take on their credit challenges, encourage them to make a plan and stick to it. For example, if your client has high credit card balances, using a strategy like the Snowball Effect can expedite the process of paying down those credit cards!
Gamify The Score: Now that your client is on the right track, make credit scoring a game. There are easy tactics to help get the most out of your credit score. One example is to keep a balance between 1-9% of your available credit limit. Another, be sure to ask your credit card companies what day they report to the credit bureaus, and be sure to strategize your payments and balance around that day.
We hope this helps you improve your client’s overall credit worthiness! If you have questions, or simply have clients that may be in need of a more comprehensive plan to build healthy credit, we’d love to hear from you. You can contact us here.