Cleaning up credit reports is awesome, but an equally important part of your job is to educate your clients so they wont fall back into the same bad patterns that got them into credit trouble in the first place. If your client continues to apply for credit, if they pay any bills late or if they continue to max out their credit cards their score will suffer.
7 important tips to pass on to your clients:
- Don’t apply for credit. Each time you do, your score suffers a hit.
- Don’t co-sign. When you co-sign on someone else’s loan, you’re agreeing to be responsible for it. If that person doesn’t pay the bill, your credit score suffers.
- Pay your bills on time. One past due payment can decrease your score by 100 points. Ouch! If you’ve accidentally missed a payment call the credit card company immediately. If you’re a good customer they will often wave a past-due posting if you ask.
- Pay credit card balances down to less than 25% of the available credit line. If your credit line is $10,000, never use more than $2,500. Never max out your credit cards, even if you pay them off each month. This quick trick will boost your score.
- Monitor your credit with a credit monitoring service like PrivacyGuard.com or at the very least, get a free Credit Karma account.
- Don’t over-promise on rapid results, rapid score increases or anything that is not true. Explain to them that bureaus are slow. Scores don’t change overnight and the creditors don’t report changes to the bureaus immediately. It all takes time.
- They must forward to you ALL Correspondence they receive from the dispute letters that you send! Without this you are working blind. Credit Monitoring will not show you what is in the letters. They must forward them to you or you cannot do your job. So when you’ve set a reminder to follow up on a dispute item, check to see if your client has forwarded the response letter they’re received. If they haven’t, then ask them to provide one so you can respond and continue with the next round.
Financial Tools for your Clients
Encourage your clients to use the financial tools in their client portal They can monitor available credit, debts expenses and more with the “Finances” tab in their Client Login Portal. You have these same tools in each client account in your Credit Repair Cloud.
These calculators are in your clients account in your Credit Repair Cloud. They are also in every client’s portal. The available-credit ratio really works. That one trick will usually increase a score dramatically.
How does this generate more revenue?
You’re in a “Service” business. Going the extra mile to help educate clients will increase customer satisfaction. Happy clients will stay longer which increases their average lifetime value. Their positive word of mouth will bring you more referrals and more money. So there’s no doubt about it, taking time to educate your clients will put extra money in your pocket. Cha-ching!
Want to give them more? Share our consumer facing guide on credit repair: