 and welcome to Connecting Hawai'i Business on ThinkTech Hawai'i. My name is Kathleen Lee and I'm the host for this program. Today we will be talking about Kupa'a Consulting Services, helping Hawai'i repair and rebuild credit scores. Okay, on today's program, we are going to be talking about credit repair services and I am honored to have the owner of Kupa'a Consulting Services, Rhonda Alexander-Mongpris on the show. Rhonda, welcome to ThinkTech Hawai'i. Thank you, Kathleen. Happy to be here. Awesome. Tell our viewers a little bit about yourself. Well, I was born and raised on the island of Oahu and then I relocated to Maui. I live in a country in Pukalani during my early adult phase of life and I've worked in a variety of industries and so I started off in hotels. Here on Maui moved to Guam and Saipan. Spent a lot of years traveling while out in Guam and Saipan and then relocated back to Maui. Spent some time at Kamehameha Schools and then I was a HUD Housing Counselor and it was while I was a HUD Housing Counselor that I recognized and realized that members of our community needed help with credit and that's how Kupa'a was born. That's wonderful. I had asked you this earlier before we started out. Tell us more about why you picked Kupa'a as a name that represents your company. Yes, I picked Kupa'a because it means one of the meanings of it is to persist and I felt that it kind of represented me as a person. Whenever I went through any life challenges and different phases, I was always able to dig deep and persist and to move forward and to be able to realize the possibilities that lay ahead and when I was evaluating what would be best with helping people with credit, Kupa'a is the foundation of it. They have to be able to look at themselves, look at their family situation and have patience and be able to persist throughout the credit repair process. Let's talk about that. I love going back to basics with our guests on the show. What is the credit score and why is it important for loans when it comes to housing? I think that's one of the main ones that you want to focus on is to help people and young individuals as well build their credit. What's the credit score? A credit score is what I often tell my clients is an adult report card. You thought you left high school and you weren't going to have grades anymore. Well, when you enter into your adult phase of life, your credit score is kind of your report card on how you're doing with managing your finances. To play the credit game, you just need to understand what it is that makes up your score and play the credit game the right way so that it'll benefit you and it'll benefit your ohana. A credit score is made up of whether or not you have credit and credit is a credit card or a loan and whether you pay those things on time. That's payment history. If you have credit cards, whether you max out your cards or whether you use it wisely and you pay it down on a monthly basis. Those are the main components of a credit score. It's payment history. It's credit utilization. It's how many 10% of your score is increased, so how many times you apply for credit and then length of history. Have you had your credit card or your loan for two years, five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years? All of those factors speed into the algorithm for calculating a number. Someone can have a credit score from 350 to 850 and the goal is of course to get the best score possible, but the sweet spot is when you have a score of 740 to 760. 740 to 760 will allow you the freedom to be able to get the best terms when you apply for a loan and the best terms when you apply for a credit card and will also get you approval for those things. I thank you for going over that because I like how you talked about the sweet spot as well. I know some individuals out there may believe that it's better off to not have a credit card, to not have certain loans. What do you make of that thought? Why is it better to have credit cards to build one's credit score? Because the the bureaus that calculate the score utilize the amount of credit lines that you have on reporting to the bureaus and so if you only have one credit card and you don't use it, you don't have any loans, you're pretty much not going to have much of a score because they don't have anything to measure how much of a risk you are for any banks or lenders to allow you to borrow money. So what you're doing is you're trying to show that you're responsible. You're responsible because you have other people who have given you credit and given you a loan and you've been able to show a history of being able to pay on time and your credit limits because of being a responsible credit user has increased progressively over time and that's what you want to be able to show to get that sweet spot credit score of 740 to 760. So banks use credit scores to determine what type of risk you are and whether or not they want to approve you for a home loan, for a car loan, for a personal loan, for a personal loan of credit or for a HELOC. Okay, so let's start with how one would because one of the main things that you help out with is for people to rebuild their credit. How would one go about that if they have a score that's less than I think you mentioned this sweet spot was 740 and below, right? So what would be one of the first steps that you typically recommend to individuals especially those that are not too versed with how to go about in erasing the credit score? I think the first thing is check your credit report you know before I get into the credit building steps. So oftentimes we you know may go through life and not check what's reporting until we're ready to go and apply for something then we get denied and then we don't know why we're getting denied. We receive a letter that says you're denied because you know you have too much late payments or you have derogatory marks on your credit or you don't have any credit. So everyone can check for their credit what's on their credit report at annualcreditreport.com and you can do that for free every year once a year during COVID people were able to do it on a weekly basis so that's annualcreditreport.com and you do it three times you check one for TransUnion one for Experian and one for Equifax you can sign up for credit monitoring software which some of them are free and some of them there's a fee so that fee could be anywhere from $14 to $50 a month for the credit monitoring software. When you sign up for a credit monitoring software then you get an actual score annualcreditreport.com you don't get a score you just get the details of what accounts are reporting. So to build credit if somebody doesn't have credit or if they need to rebuild credit there's two things I usually recommend to clients of Kupa one is to sign up for the self-program so the self-program is a savings program you can sign up online within five minutes it costs $9 to sign up and you commit to putting $25 a month for a period of 24 months into a savings account it reports to all three bureaus which is what you want you want you want whatever credit you have to report to all three bureaus for that entire 24 months you set it up on automatic payment and doing that for three to six months in time you'll see that your score is going to go up anywhere from 25 to 50 points just by having that. The second one is to set up for to apply for a credit builder card so the one I like to recommend is capital one so they don't do a credit pool you can go onto their website you can click on the criteria that says no annual fee you know you don't need a credit card that has an annual fee and credit builder and then if you don't have any credit history you might have to put like $200 down on the card for it to be a secured card then you put one thing on there nowadays all of us have subscriptions to something so if we have a subscription to Netflix which is about $20 a month Hulu $12 a month some sort of Apple subscription that's you know seven to eight dollars a month just put that on that one card and set it up on auto pay and now you're setting up payment history you're showing that you're buying something on the card so you're a user of the credit you're paying that on time and over time your credit score will start to start to build so for my son who's 19 him and his cousin I when they turned 18 I started them on the credit builder program so set them up with a capital one card they had to find the $200 to put on the card right that's the responsible thing to do for them he signed up for sell I added him on as an authorized user to my and my husband's credit cards and and we had you know so you want to be added on as an authorized user to someone who is excellent credit history somebody in your family anti uncle grandma friend neighbor somebody we did not give him the card he did not get any one of our credit cards and he understood it and within six months time his credit score was at 800 so it went from zero to 800 so then at that point he was able to put in and apply for a loan and get qualified for a card loan which you know at 18 years old that's that's an important life milestone in their eyes and he's very lucky to have you to have him go through that process I think that's actually pretty it's a great reminder that you mentioned that because I I think I may need to do that as well put my subscriptions on my cards because I have it directly onto my debit cards earlier you mentioned COVID and I discussed like I try to bring in how the pandemic has affected people when it comes to your business how did COVID affect people and their credit scores and the type of clientele that you were getting well it's sad and it's tough because COVID was unexpected you know who of us knew that people would not have income anymore and you had all of this debt that you had a system with right that you were able to make payments on a monthly basis and so yeah clients did come in where they had accounts that went into charge offer collection status and they weren't sure how to approach it and what to do about it they had cars that were repossessed where they cosigned for loans for people that they were no longer associated with anymore but they're still responsible for the loan for people who ended up separating because of the life struggles and challenges just ended up to be a stressor on their relationship and so all of those joint accounts that they had each person is responsible for for it no matter what a divorce decree or an agreement may say about your you know person A is responsible for this car loan person B is responsible for this personal loan if the other person doesn't pay it it still impacts person B's credit report and credit score so all of these different examples is what I saw for clients that have been coming in trying to clean it up so what we do at Koopa is we take a look at it we do a free credit audit we put together some strategies for everyone strategies they can do on their own through credit education and some of the tips I shared earlier about building credit and then strategies that we can do using Koopa and are done for you program. Let's go over some of the tips that you had or maybe more tips that you can offer so you mentioned that a lot of people did go through hardships during the pandemic and hardships translate to derogatory scores on one's credit report when you see that on there how does one address that contest that get it off the report where does one start. Yeah so you start with the bullying your credit then second you take a look at what items are on there if they don't look like an account that you recognize that you're uncertain of then my suggestion is to put things in writing I hear a lot of clients that come forward that say why I called them I spoke to them and I say okay when did you speak to them what was the date what was the time who did you talk to always put everything in writing I know the um the desire is to try and take care of it right away and you can do that through a phone call you know it feels like it's quicker and you're going to get it done but I find that a lot of people who did things by phone they don't have records of anything and so they don't have any proof or evidence to give to the bureaus to say hey representative XYZ from Capital One credit card I spoke to them they told me it was going to be updated and they didn't update it and so always do everything in writing is my first recommendation um and always request for a response in writing um with Experian Equifax and TransUnion if you have logged in and created online accounts they now have your email so even if they receive a letter in writing from you they're going to try and correspond with you by email and their intention is to get you to respond back by email or to log on to their site and to to put your concerns um online through their website so when you do that the terms and conditions when you checkmark the box and say I agree you know the one that we that we don't even read normally we just checkmark it and move on um with that you're waiting your rights to use um any sort of legal representative to assist you and agree to arbitration so if I just want people to know that if if that's the route you want to go then have at it I usually tell people don't submit anything online do everything in writing um so that's the one thing that I would recommend for them is to to put things in writing and they can write different letters that aren't theirs so if they feel that inquiries are on there that are not theirs they didn't give authorization for it then they can call the credit bureau's fraud line and they can also write letters to request for those unauthorized inquiries to be removed from their credit report and then they can write and let them know what they think is wrong with the account that's reporting so if the charge off is incorrect the collection status is incorrect the late payments are incorrect then they can write to the bureau to let them know that it's not corrected to please remove or update it to positive ronnie that's very valuable information especially in this day and age where um we have credit monitoring apps uh or services that you know that encourage people to do everything online so I think it's very valuable for you to remind our viewers that the record-keeping part of it is very crucial could you go over and you you did it earlier could you go over some of the services that kupaak consulting services offers to the people of hoy yeah so the first step is you know go to the website click on the button that says get free audit I mean that everyone should do get the free audit let's take a look at your credit report together let's lay out those strategies um then at that point you can decide if you want to enroll in paid services or if you want to hold and consider it for later so when you go through paid services you're going to get undisputed amount of letters that are set on a monthly basis so the fecura laws say that when the bureau receives your dispute letter by law they have 30 days to investigate so we got to wait for that investigation to take place they contact their original creditors the original creditors have the opportunity to respond and then they usually respond to you and to the client in writing and the client gets the response to me at kupaak take a look at it and then we send out the next round so the response could be an item was updated to positive an item was deleted or an item was verified so in the next round we're going to request for a method of verification okay if you're saying that this is verified I want to see your method of verification show us proof and this is why credit repair works because we're consistent we're persistent we use a variety of different consumer laws to leverage to show that what's recording is it accurate and is it verifiable and those are the things of the fecura law that the the bureaus as well as the creditors must follow all good points what are some lessons that you've learned running your business that you would like to share with people you got to be persistent consistent you got to find your tribe that's going to help to elevate you motivate you support you um and I think pelina is important you know I am out and about building relationships with different lenders and why lenders because lenders get people that come to them to apply for loans and they get denied and most times the reason why they're getting denied is because of credit well we're great referral partners um because I can help fix the credits and then back to the lender and the lender gets the loan and the client is able to get what they wanted you know initially to meet their family goals um yeah that's wonderful and I know I love how you have your motto or what you would like to do as to um is to help people achieve their goals to buy rental or get a rental buy a home get a personal loan or help young adults build their credit profile on that last note what is like a couple of things what are a couple of things that you would like to tell young people who are building their profile what I want to tell them is that you know you take the time just take a few minutes to learn the basics about credit and um get a credit card I know people say don't get a credit card no get a credit card just use it for that one thing to show repeated use and on time payment um go out and either get a secured loan or sign up for self to start your credit building history because I am a believer that each of us who live here in Hawaii can continue to live here and can be a homeowner and you're going to be able to do that by having a solid credit report and credit score I like that and I like how you have that as part of your goal I think that's uh like a larger one right where we try to keep people here in Hawaii so I really appreciate that that's part of your mission is there anything else that you would like to add that we have not gone over because I know you know credit reports um credit building and credit repairs it you can talk about it for days but if you have anything else that you would like to add in the few minutes that we have left what would you like to say yeah I just that I think people who feel that they don't have an option of what to do to fix their credit they do you know don't feel defeated for some people it might take one to two years but at least you're making progress and you're making forward movement you know and that's what you want to do and I have some clients who have bankruptcy and repossessions on their credit report and it took three to four months for them to make that mental shift to recognize and realize that the little bumps that we were getting in their credit score on a monthly basis and the one deletion here the three deletions there it all served as kind of a motivator for them that they were making the right decisions and putting their efforts in the right place to be able to get to where they want to go and then connecting them with the right people let's say if their goal is to buy a home connecting them with the right lenders that are going to be supportive of their journey which so many great lenders are out there that are like we all want to help our community to be able to get credit ready to buy a home like that's that's i'm passionate about it that's my dream that's my dream for my neighbors for my friends friends for my nieces for my nephews for everyone i think that's wonderful and it's good it's good for you to have that dream so people could have someone to turn to you know to have those dreams realized ronda if people would like to learn more about how to build with or repair the credit or just have a credit coach how do they get a hold of you my phone number is 808 731 0752 they can follow me on social media at kupa consulting um and they can also go to the website kupa consulting dot com so you know a couple of client success stories to that i think might help others that are out there who may be in similar situations i had a business owner who had a he lock with the local who had a personal line of credit with the local bank and during covid when their business shut down they weren't able to make payments and they went into forbearance and so they were able to catch up but the bank was still reporting that their payments were late for 28 months and it was preventing them from getting a he lock that they needed so within three months of service of writing letters um we were able to to get all of the late payments removed and they qualified for the he lock you know and then we had a big island person who also is a homeowner was looking to get a he lock got denied and they had a combination of a repossessed card that was inaccurate they had late payments charged us in collections after seven months of service and doing pay for delete arrangements for some of the collections we were able to get them approved for their he lock loan as well um and then we have um three clients who have graduated from the program and have since either bought land or purchased a home so these are kind of the proud moments that we celebrate with our clients um we call them our our credit wins right so we celebrate with them and we cheer them on and then we bring in the next client and help them do the same ronda thank you for sharing that and for all you do and helping people in hawaii rebuild and repair their credit we've been talking with ronda alexander monkers of kupa a consulting services today so thank you again for being on the show and thank you as well to think tech hawaii for making shows like this possible today we had haley and mike helping us out until next time aloha thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram and linked in and donate to us at think.kawaii.com mahalo