 This is Stink Tech, Hawaii. Community Matters here. Guys, and we're live here on the Prince of Investing, right here live in Haululu, Hawaii. And we are on episode 15, and we still haven't got canceled. So it's always a good thing. But thank you guys for tuning in across the globe and across the world. Thank you guys for all the great responses and all the great stuff like that. But as always, I don't have a lot of time, and I definitely, you guys don't have a lot of time, so we're going to jump straight into it. Now, as you guys can see in the description box, the description title, and all that great stuff like that, we have a very, very special guest coming into, not coming to us, but that's live with us right now. And we're going to talk about what some people consider the most powerful tool in finance. We're going to be talking about credit, good credit, bad credit, repairing credit, building credit, all of the great stuff like that. So without further ado, let me introduce my very, very special guest, Ms. Tara Jackson. How are you doing, Ms. Jackson? I am awesome. How are you? I'm doing outstanding. If people out there who don't know who Ms. Tara Jackson is, can you tell people a little bit about yourself? Well, yeah, I'm a single mom. I have made several major money mistakes and have rebounded from them. And I have been a financial institution executive for many, many years from a bank officer to a VP of lending, to an executive vice president, to a CEO of financial institutions across the United States. I even spent some time in Honolulu, Hawaii when I was a little kid because I'm a military black. Shout out to Hickam Air Force Base. And yeah, I just love teaching people about the minutiae of money, the magnetism of money, how to empower yourself with money, how to bring it to you, how to manage it. And they call me Madam Money because I wrote a book called Financial Fornication. So I am just that down-to-earth person that understands what it's like not to have money, what it's like struggling to get money, what it's like to get money, what it's like to lose money, what it's like to get it back again, and how to do it the right way. So there is life after financial hardships, and I just want people to know that we can have a better life as long as we understand the language of money. So I just teach people how to talk that language of money and get what they want and desire and need. Okay. That's great. That's a lot of stuff you just said there, but that is true. And some of you know, Ms. Jackson, for you guys to know, she has appeared on, this is her first time on this particular platform, but she's been on my podcast, my YouTube, my social media, Instagram, all of the great stuff like that. And I found Ms. Jackson a couple of years ago, and someone I look up to in the financial industry that puts out a lot of great knowledge, tools around the globe, does a lot of awesome stuff on social media throughout and even with her book that I have, but I forgot to bring it here with me in the studio today. But for the people that are tuning in today, if you comment who are the first two people to comment with the word Tara, T-A-R-R-A, that's how you spell it, right? I got it right. You got it right. I'm seeing, you know, see how I can spell something. First two people to comment with that, you're going to get a copy of her book, Mail To You, wherever you at around the globe. So the first two people, when you comment, I'm going to send you an email or an inbox or whatever the case can be, ask you for your address because I've got to be able to send it somewhere. And those are, you know, those are the way we do it. That's the way we get so much knowledge off of the principle of investing and stuff like that and to get Ms. Tara Jackson's message out. But like we said, we're going to speak about credit, right? As we speak about the purposes of credit. Now, what are some, like you said, you had some issues in the past financially. How someone who's out there who has, you know, they want to go buy a house or a car and they found that their credit score was too low. What steps would you give them to like, hey, how can I figure this mess out? Well, I mean, one, we need to understand what the significance of credit really is and why everyone's harping on credit. You should have credit. You should have good credit. And the main reason for that is because credit has become not only a qualifier, but an identifier. A lot of financial institutions use your credit to make sure you are who you say you are. And so it's very important for us to, one, understand what's in our credit and understand how to leverage it, too. It helps us to get the things that we want. You know, I mean, so it gives us leverage within that. So when we want to start building credit, building credit, we have got to understand the magnitude of what credit is. Now, your question, and repeat your question for me, so I'll make sure that I answer it specifically so that the audience understands. So a lot of people say, hey, you know what? My credit is bad. I messed it up or whatever the case can be. How do I fix it? What's the step that you're going to take? You know, it's not as difficult as most people may think to fix your credit. The reason why, as long as you understand the anatomy of your credit score, then you can do what's necessary to actually fix your credit. Even if you have what I call colorful credit. Now, maybe black and blue. But, you know, at least if you understand the five categories or what I call the anatomy of the credit score, you can understand what you can do in each of those categories to repair your credit. So, you know, 35% of your credit score is based on how you pay your bills. So paying your bills on time. Now, it could be a situation where you had a financial hardship, you lost your job, or you just didn't have the means to pay. And so you have a lot of past due credit on your credit report. Well, the credit report, as long as you start doing something positive on there, that's what's going to help your credit report. So start small, you know, start repairing the small stuff. Get the small collection items off. The larger collection items, you may want to contact the financial institution when you're able to pay them, but try to negotiate the amount that you owe. See if you can do a settlement. It may be less than the amount owed, but at least they may take a lesser amount and report that as paid but settled. You want to start paying things on time. You may want to start re-establishing your credit with a secured credit card. You, if you have an opportunity where your credit is not, it's colorful, but it's not that bad, you may be able to do a consolidation loan with the right credit union or financial institution. So 35% of your credit score is based on payment history. 30% of your credit is based on your utilization of your lines of credit or your credit limits. So for example, if you grab a credit card, that's a $1,000 limit and you used up a $1,000 worth of that limit, you have zero availability, that's going to hurt 30% of your credit score. So the object of the game is try to pay down your credit cards as much as possible so you have more available than you have a balance. And the rule of thumb is about 30% balance to your credit limit. Now, some people say it's lower, some people say it's higher, but if you can keep it 50% or lower down to 30% or lower, you're going to help 30% of your credit score. So if you can start paying down those credit cards and not use them. So I tell people when you're going through this process of re-establishing credit, you want to do what's called financial abstinence, okay? So I talk about that in my book Financial for Unication. You want to stop using, if you're dealing with financial dis-ease, the first thing you need to do is to stop using the credit. So when you stop using that credit, it gives you an opportunity to start healing the process by paying down those credit cards. You with me so far? Got you. Now, you said a lot there, you know, so I want to walk people through who may have gotten, you know, like, wait, she dropped a lot of knowledge right there, right? So you say, hey, if you have a credit card, you have a credit issue, the first thing you want to do is to say, hey, no. Stop, put the credit card away. Some people say put it in the freezer, whatever the case may be. So you stop utilizing the credit. Second thing you're saying doing is to maybe, see, can you renegotiate your old balance or your interest rate maybe? You can negotiate what you owe. Maybe you can come up with a settlement on things on a credit report. So the big thing she was saying is like, hey, first thing you need to do is to get your credit report, figure out what you have. Some people have reached out to me and said, hey, man, I'm trying to fix my credit. Well, I'm like, well, I don't know what's going on. Do you even know what's going on? So you have resources like annualcreditreport.com to give you one for the three big bureaus. All you have sites like Credit Karma. Get your credit report and see what you owe. And then the big thing that you just said was to, once you find out what you have in collections, pay down the small ones first. Get those small victories. Exactly. And then renegotiate. Am I following you correctly? Exactly. Yeah, and you touched on a very good point is that if you're dealing with financial dis-easers, you have to know what you're working with. It's like when you're feeling sick, like I'm feeling a little bit under the weather. I can self-diagnose myself and then go over the counter and get some stuff. But I need to go to a professional or at least need to understand what my illness is so I can treat it properly. So you have to first pull your credit reports to see what kind of financial dis-ease you're dealing with. Is it just a mild disease? You only have one collection item or one pass due that's really hurting your score? Are you dealing with financial STDs, substantially tremendous debt? And you need to really have a payment plan to pay all this stuff down. So that's a very awesome point that you brought up. The first thing you need to do is assess where you are by going to the free resources of annualcreditreport.com and getting a copy of your Equifax TransUnion and Experian Credit Reports. If you don't know how to read them, you can definitely reach out to me through madamoney.com or go to a credit professional and then to start building a plan based on what your financial dis-ease is to cure that. And like I said, 35% of your credit score is how you pay your bills and another 30% is your balances next to your credit limits. If you can pay your bills on time and you can keep those balances low, you've helped 65% of your score already. Okay, so pretty much long story short, let's say if you're someone who has, you know, a 700 credit score, 700, 750, but you owe 20 grand on a credit card and you're kind of like, well, I want to get rid of this. I want to, you know, I owe 20 grand but my credit limit is 25 but I want to get better. What advice would you give that person? They're like, hey, I'm in a good place but I want to get better. I want my credit score to be even better than what it already is. It's like being healthy but you want to stay healthy and stay fit, right? So you're still going to do some maintenance on it. You're still going to go to the gym, you're still going to eat right because you want to maintain your healthiness or get more fit. So it's the same thing with your credit. If you have a $25,000 credit limit and your balance is 20,000, well, you want to bring that balance down to say 15 or 10,000 or even $5,000 because the lower that limit, the lower that balance is to that limit, it's going to help your credit score tremendously. And the reason why financial institutions or the credit bureaus and the credit scoring systems weigh so heavily on your balances next to your credit limits is because it shows how responsible you are, how disciplined you can be with credit. People that, you know, spend over their limit or up to their limit, that's showing that you may not have the discipline or you may not be that responsible with or can handle credit. And that's why that hurts your credit score so dramatically at 30%. So if you can at least pay them down or keep your balances low, like even if you get a secured credit card and you keep that balance low or pay it off every month, that's going to help your credit score 30%. And something that's mentioned, you keep saying this word secure credit card, but people out there who don't know what a secure credit card is, what is a secure credit card? That's an excellent question. A secure credit card is when your credit card is secured by your funds or your money in a savings account or if you're with a credit union at what's called a share account, that's just a savings account. So you put up the money, say $300, $500 and that's on hold. And then the credit card, you're then given that amount or less or more. And it's what's securing that credit card is the cash that you put on hold or that's in that savings account. And that's really good because for financial institution that minimizes the risk to them of losing the money should you decide not to pay, they have your money to pay it off. But it reports on your credit report as an unsecured credit limit. And so if you think about a secured loan or secured on a credit, you think about a car. You get a car loan and what's securing that loan is your vehicle. So in the event you choose not to pay or you're unable to pay the vehicle loan, they'll repossess the car and they'll sell it in order to recoup the money that you didn't pay and hopefully they can recoup all of it. So that's relatively the same thing with a credit card. It gives you the benefits on your credit report of an unsecured line of credit and you can use it as such. You can use it, it's a major credit card so you can travel with it, you can use it for whatever, anywhere major credit cards are accepted. But what's securing it is your funds. And here's the thing. I think every young person that's starting with credit or every person that's trying to rebound with their credit should start with a secured credit card because my whole philosophy is if you can't say for it, you really can't afford to borrow for it. So if some people say, you know, I can't afford to put away $500 to secure a credit card then you probably really don't need the credit card. Got it. Now what we're gonna do right here, we're gonna have more with Ms. Tyra Jackson. You guys stay tuned. We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be, don't touch the dial. We'll be right back with more Ms. Tyra Jackson and your credit and the most powerful tool in finance. This is Stink Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Planning all week for the day of the big game. Watching at home just doesn't feel the same. What on the list is who's gonna drive? It's nice to know you're gonna get home alive. Plan for fun and responsibility. Choose the DD. Captain of our team, it's the DD. For every game day, a sign a designated driver. Guys, and we are back here with the Prince of Investing right here live in the beautiful state of Haluulu, Hawaii. If you guys haven't been following, we got Ms. Tyra Jackson, Ms.Madamoney.com on the line right now. I don't know, what are you at right now, Ms. Tyra? I am on the East Coast. I am far, far, far away from you. Far, far, far away. Delaware. Delaware on the East Coast. It's on the other side of the world, but that's okay. But she's right here with us today. You guys who missed out on her, she was talking about, and I said it before the break, first two people that comment on the YouTube or the Facebook or whatever social media with the word Tyra, the first two people would get a copy of her book, Financial Fornication. So comment on, comment with the word Tyra. I'm gonna send you an email address, not an email address, but I'm gonna need your address and once I get that, it'll be out to you. Now she had some crazy points in earlier when she spoke about secure credit cards for young adults. Now when you speak about young adults, that parent that may be, they may have a little child or it may have a, not a toddler, but as far as like in high school, maybe getting ready to go off to college. And they're thinking, well, how can I line my child up to set their credit up or put them in a good place? What advice would you give them? The first advice is that you can't really start building credit for a child until they reach the age of 18 because that's the legal age to sign a contract. And anything before the age of 18, it could be considered as identity theft. So you gotta be careful with that unless you have them just on as an authorized user. They can't really sign a contract so you can't make them a joint owner or anything like that. But if you have a young adult that's 18 years old, 18 years or older and you're trying to establish credit, there's a few fun ways to help them establish credit. One, of course, is the secure credit card. You can put up $300, $500 and then they have a secure credit card in their name and you can be, you know, the adult can be the joint owner that can be just in their name and then teach them, you know, use it and pay it off, use it and pay it off. There's this misnomer that you have to revolve the balance. I mean, I'm a financial institution, you know, but if you wanna pay me the answer, it's cool. But I always tell people, it doesn't matter what the interest rate is if you pay it off every month, it's zero percent. Like my credit card I have, regardless of what they say the interest rate is, it's zero percent for me because I pay it off every month. But what I'm doing is just trying to improve my score and maintain and keep it physically fit, keep my financially fit. There you go. So a secure credit card, so secure it. The second thing you can do is called piggyback. And so the piggyback is, you just, the parent have a loan and you make the child a joint owner. Or you have a child to apply for a thousand dollar loan or 500 dollar loan. And the adult is the joint owner and it's really based on the adult's credit but it helps to report that information on the young adult. So as long as they pay it off every month or pay it on time, I should say, that's gonna help build their credit there. And the last thing is if they don't have credit, say if you're a parent and you have colorful credit but you wanna start building a child's credit and they can't do a secured credit card, but they may be renting somewhere. Well, there's opportunities to report your rent on the credit reports. There's several opportunities. So there's websites like ClearNow, C-L-E-A-R-N-O-W.com on rentreporters.com. And there's even another one called Rental Karma, R-E-N-T-A-L-K-H-A-R-M-A.com. And that just allows you to get your landlord to report your rental payments, or report their rental payments to the credit reporting agencies. And that can help with establishing credit. So someone who's paying rent, they can have their rent go towards their credit report if they go to these websites? Yeah, so they make it easy for the rental office or the landlord to report the rental payments on their credit report. Now, of course, the landlord has to agree to do it and there's a process so they get in touch with the landlord and all that, but there is that opportunity to do that because under normal circumstances, rental offices or landlords, they don't report to your credit report unless you don't pay or you have a, they get a judgment on you or whatever. So this is an opportunity to get the good stuff reported on your credit report. Awesome. See, that's the things that I didn't recognize. I didn't know that, because usually people who own houses, your mortgage is reported, but usually your rent, kind of like never uses full of credit cards, maybe a car loan or things like that. Because, and I'm glad that you hit up on a point where some people who may have good credit already, that you could possibly lose good credit because if you're not utilizing it, right? Am I correct on that? Don't you have to kind of use it to kind of keep it fit as well? Because let's say if I paid off all my loans and I just lived off of cash, would my credit still be A1 or would it, you know? I mean, it depends. It depends on if there is no activity. Say if there's no activity for several years, more than seven years, you probably would go back to the drawing board if there's no credit reporting. But if you have a credit card that's out there and they don't close it because it's what's called dormant or unutilized, if they keep that open, you'll still have a credit report, you know, a credit score reporting as far as the financial institutions are reporting something on there. So the, just think about it this way. Your credit report is your grade book. It's your financial grade book. And each of your financial or your credit items are the different classes or the different assignments that you do. So you may have a Bank of America assignment with a loan and you may have a Wells Fargo assignment with a credit card. And depending on how you perform, they're gonna report that grade to the credit reporting agencies in that grade book. Now your score is based on the information in your credit report. So that's like your financial grade, okay? So that score is entirely based on everything that's in your credit report or that grade book. And so it could change. So you may do good one month, but then you may have a bad month. You didn't turn it into assignments. So you got a zero. It did end your GPA from a 4.0 down to a 3.0. So that's essentially how the credit reporting is done or executed. As long as you understand the game, you can kind of play around with it. So if you know you have no credit, the best thing to do is probably to get a credit card and keep that balance zero or utilize it every now and then and pay it off. Use it and pay it off. And don't get caught up with someone that says you have to keep a balance on a credit card. You do not. As a financial institution, I would prefer you to because I want to earn the interest. I want you to pay interest to me because that's the number one way we make money is through loan and credit interest income. But as a consumer advocate, why pay me the interest when you can keep that money for yourself and just pay for the balance? So every credit card is a zero balance if you pay it off every month. And that's how you can win that financial game. Got it. Wow. So now she said a lot of good things about there. For the person out there who wants to build credit, she said, hey, if you want to build credit and you are in a good position, some people pay off a lot of things with cash. You got to keep in mind that even if you pay off something with cash after seven years, you could potentially be back at the drawing board but keeping the credit card open, right? And she said, hey, you don't have to keep a balance. But as long as you keep it open, that goes onto your credit history because it's a part of credit utilization as well. Now, Mr. Jackson, before we close out of here, is there anything that you want to say or leave with the listeners and that how they may get this through the podcast, YouTube, Facebook, are they're live right now? Is there anything you want to say to them? As far as the credit, just understand that everybody now is looking at your credit from the financial institutions to insurance companies to utility companies to cell phone companies to employers. Everybody's looking at your credit report either to qualify you for something or to identify you with something. So it's very important that you know what people are looking at. Nobody should know more about your credit than you do. That's like somebody knowing more about what's going on in your house than you do. That should never happen. And there's free resources, whether it's with credit comma, whether it's with any credit report.com, you can definitely find that information out. If you need help with that, you can go to my website, madammoney.com, M-A-D-A-M-M-O-N-E-Y. And then I would love to be a resource for you. Also, credit is meant to be leveraged, not a life preserver or a life saver. So if you find yourself trying to apply for credit just to pay bills, you're using it the wrong way. It's just like a revolver. The gun itself is not deadly. It's the person using the gun. If they don't know how to use it, that's what makes it deadly. But it's the same thing with credit. That's why a lot of people are dealing with financial STDs, substantially tremendous debt, because they did not understand how to leverage and use credit. But the great thing is, is you may have made some mistakes, like I've made some major money mistakes, but there's always a way to resurrect, to rebound, and to always get that 700 score. There's always a way to get that 700 score regardless of where you are. Okay. Now, people who want to get in contact with you, who want to follow you, how can you do that? They can go to my website, MadamMoney.com. They can also get my book, Financial Punication on Amazon.com. You know, I wrote that book because I was financially promissuous with my credit and I had all these financial midnight stands. And then, Baby's Heart, and I ended up with financial STDs, substantially tremendous debt, and I needed some cures. So I wrote the book to really tell my story and to share how I got out of it and how I got a really good financial relationship with my financial institutions and credit. So make sure you check it out on Amazon.com or my website, but to get in contact with me, or for some more free resources, go to madammoneywide.com. All right. So on top of that, if you guys want to get a free copy, you comment, Tara, and the first two people will get a copy, sent down to them, we're already across the globe. But as always, guys, it's that time again for me to close out the show. And this is The Prince of Investing here in Hollywood, Hawaii. My name is Prince Dykes. And to the next podcast, YouTube, Cartoon Booker, whatever you see me do, crazy around the globe. Peace, be safe, I'm out. Thank you.