The Budgetnista: How to Make Your Credit Score Jump like Jordan

Tiffany "The Budgetnista" Aliche is a speaker and passionate, award winning teacher of fun financial empowerment.

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This video is an entry in the GOBankingRates Summer Savings Video Challenge. Share with your friends using #GBR1MinMoneyTip and watch more videos about the best ways to save money.

Transcript:

Hey hey hey, it's me, The Budgetnista, here to help you live a little bit richer. So I have a quick and easy tip to help your credit score jump like Jordan.

Are you ready? Let's go.

You are going to pay a credit card to zero every month. That's it. Okay, that's not it…

That really is it, though, but I'm going to explain how you're going to do it. So you're going to take one of your current credit cards that you've already paid off or one that you're close to paying off — and pay it off. If you don't have either of those, then you're going to go to GOBankingRates.com and find a credit card that suits you; maybe you get a travel one, or a student one, or one for gas or whatever. Open it up, it will already have a zero balance.

If you can't qualify for a regular credit card because maybe you've been a little bit with your current credit cards, you can go to your local bank or the bank that you use, and ask and apply for a secured credit card. It's like a credit card with training wheels because with a secured card, you put the money up and that's your limit.

So either way, you're going to get a credit card that has a zero balance, and then what you're going to do is you're going to look at your budget (hopefully you have one) and you're going to find the smallest bill on your budget — so maybe it's Netflix, $8 a month or maybe you have a $25 a month gym membership that you never use — you are going to tell your gym membership instead of charging your bank account and nobody takes the money out, instead you're going to put your credit card right in the middle and your gym membership is going to charge the credit card and your bank account is going to pay off the credit card. Gym membership — charge the card automatically, bank account — pay off the card. And it's going to be this automatic cycle that you will not be a part of, and that card is going to stay at home, and your going to do that every single month. Pay that credit card balance to zero and your credit score is going to jump like Jordan.

And I promise it will.

So how do I know this works? Because it worked for me. Before the recession, I had a credit score of 802 (which is like A++ if you didn't know) and then during the recession I lost my job as a preschool teacher and I could not afford my mortgage, so my 802 went to 547. Yes! And so I used this tip myself: I had a credit card, it was already at zero, so I began charging my gym membership to it — $20 a month — and after a year and a half my credit score went from 547 to 702, and then three months after that, it went to 752.

So I'm not just telling you this, it works!

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