eCredable Blog - Learn to Build Credit

eCredable Lift® provides consumers with the ability to report their utility accounts in their TransUnion credit report. Most utility companies do not report your positive payment history to the credit bureaus, which means you don’t get any credit for paying these accounts on time.

Over 700,000 Americans submitted personal bankruptcy filings in 2017, at an average clip of 60,000 per month. And these are just the new filings, which don’t truly capture the sheer volume of Americans who currently have bankruptcies on their records. Since 2012, 5.3 million Americans have added a bankruptcy to their records.

U.S. student loan debt hit the $1.5 trillion mark earlier this year, but Southerners appear to be shouldering more than their share.

If you don’t use credit or just started building it, chances are you have no credit file or maybe just a thin one — it’s there, but there’s not much to it. That can leave you with a low credit score or no credit score at all, which may make it difficult to get credit when you need it.

It’s irritating to run across a bill and to realize it was due yesterday… or last week. If it’s a credit card bill, you may also have to pay a fee (sometimes, if it’s a rare slip-up, you can get it waived), and it can be especially scary to find an overdue bill if you have applied for credit or plan to in order to make a big purchase, like a house or vehicle. Readers often ask us how late a payment has to be before their creditors report it to the credit bureaus:

The last time I got up in front of a group to talk about my job, no one had questions for me. It was a high school career day a few weeks ago, and the students stared at me blankly as I dropped words like “personal finance,” “credit scores” and “debt.” I could tell they thought my work wasn’t exciting, that the topics I write about are boring. Everyone was happy when the bell rang to end my session.

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, most negative information can be reported on credit reports for seven years. Why seven? Why not five, or 10 or some other amount of time?

Last month, the White House announced that more than half of American adults would soon have access to free credit scores through their credit card issuers. Soon after, Citi began sharing scores with its cardholders. Last week, upstart VantageScore announced it was making in-roads with lenders and is about to serve its 1 billionth score. This week comes word from FICO, the folks who supply the most commonly-used credit score, that it will for the first time make 18 different versions of its FICO score available to consumers — for a fee.

How long should someone wait for a credit report? I mailed AnnualCreditReport.com requests for a single credit agency report for my daughter and myself, but neither of us has received a response. I do not want to send an additional request and be billed for multiple reports.

How to leverage Alternative Data (like phone and utility bills) to impact traditional credit scores like FICO and VantageScore