Hey, yo, what it do with your boy Jay Lew? And you guys are just in time for something new. Now, in this blog, what I wanna talk to you guys about is something that is way more important than waving. And what I mean when I say that is I wanna talk to you guys today about, you is how to increase your credit score!
Now with this blog, this blog is definitely something that deviates away from my main content or my channel, but I promised you guys at 3000 subs that I was gonna put out a blog just based off of credit and things like that and how you can increase your credit score. Yes, the number in my thumbnail is real it’s my actual credit score.
I figured I’d go through and give you a breakdown of things that I’ve learned in my life just to help some of you young boys out that is starting off and maybe still in high school. And y’all want to be able to have a greater footing when it comes to your life. Do you know what I’m saying? You don’t only just wanna have dope and elite waves, you also wanna be able to live an elite lifestyle.
And sadly enough, one of the things that help you be able to do that in America is credit. All right? Now, with that being said, I am not a professional and all of this advice that I’m giving you is just coming from a guy with seven 20 waves. Do you know what I’m saying? I’ve been just working on brushing my ways and that’s really what my channel is about. But like I said, for me personally, I don’t care about being caught in elite waiver if my life is elite. Do you know what I’m saying? So with that being said, let’s not waste any more time. Let’s just jump straight into it.
If you would like to watch the video on how to increase your credit score, feel free to check it out below:
The 6 Factors To Increase Your Credit Score
All right? So with this blog, what I wanna do is, is simply approach this from an elementary level. Now in America, in order to have a good credit score, the funny thing is you have to go into debt in order to obtain that credit score. Now, if you don’t know anything about credit, credit is basically saying you want to go to the store to buy a major purchase or something like that, and you don’t have the cash right then and there to pay for it.
Let’s just break it down into examples that you guys can understand. You need a new Mac laptop, you know? So what you decide to do is go into the Apple store, and you find the one that you like, but it cost about a thousand to $2,000. Now, at that time, you don’t have a thousand and $2,000 on hand. So credit became a thing because banks and other financial institutions decided to say, Hey, I will loan you this money to make this purchase, but you have to pay me back with interest.
Now you purchase your Mac, and over time you will pay it off by making monthly payments to pay towards your credit card. When you make the purchase, whatever credit card or whatever company that you are, are partnered with, they will pay the expenses of your laptop and you’ll be able to take the laptop home, work on it, get a few more paychecks, and then pay it off eventually. You know what I’m saying?
Now, with that being said, one thing I need to say is a lot of people tend to have bad credit scores because of the simple, simple fact that they don’t know how to apply discipline whenever they make purchases. What I always recommend is some of you young guys and stuff like that, is you wanna live within your means. What that simply boils down to is you don’t want to go out and live this flashy lifestyle, get yourself into debt by putting stuff on a credit card.
On the surface level, it looks like, Oh man, y’all life is amazing. You got all these flashy clothes, you got a nice car, and all this stuff like that. But what most people don’t see is that you are in debt. You know what I’m saying? Now, I wanna talk about the things that most people probably don’t know when it comes to credit scores
Now, when it comes to ways to increase your credit score, there are six things that you need to understand in order to increase your credit score. But in order to have credit, you need to have a credit card. There is a second type of credit that I won’t go into. You know what I’m saying? That deals with paying your rent and everything on time. But the credit that I’m referring to today, it revolves around making major purchases and things like that in the store.
Now for me, I got my credit card when I was in high school through Capital One, and the main reason why is because you want to pick somebody that has a good standing. You know what I’m saying? Now, if Capital One was sponsoring your boy, I would give him a major shot of then say, Go get it. You know what I’m saying?
But at the end of the day, from my personal experiences, I’ve never really had any issues with Capital One. And one thing I like about Capital One is that they send you this information to be able to help you understand better. All right? So the first thing that you guys need to understand when it comes to increase your credit score is the most important. It’s paying your credit card on time. It makes no sense if you have a credit card and you never pay it on time.
Now, some of you young boys that may not know what I’m talking about, whenever you make that purchase and you buy that laptop, what will happen is Capital One will say, Hey, by the first of this month, you need to pay me at least $50 towards the total of this laptop. You know what I’m saying?
Now, you can choose to pay the $50, you can choose to pay more, but what you want to do is at least pay the minimum. You know what I’m saying? Because if you don’t pay that $50, it won’t count as an on time payment and it’ll count against you. But, but, but the more on time payments you make, then the higher your score will be.
All right? Now the second thing is having an established line of credit, you want to have a credit card for an extended period of time. So what that boils down to for me, when I was in high school, my mom knew it was beneficial for me to get a credit card as soon as possible. Now with that being said, when I was in high school, my mom, she didn’t let me use my credit card and she basically got it for me.
So it would affect that factor of having a long line of credit. But one thing that I learned is this factor is not something that is high on the totem pole because a lot of people will fear and say, Dang, man, I’m in my thirties. I don’t have a credit card. I didn’t believe in that. I just took the money under the mattress and stuff like that.
But now I wanna get a credit card because I wanna make purchases. And one thing I wanna say to you guys is don’t worry about it. You know what I’m saying? It does help in the sense that if somebody can see that you’ve had a credit card for at least 15 years and they see that you made on time payments all the time, that’s how it affects your your score more. So, and this boils down to the simple principle.
Everybody has their one friend there. They always ask you for money. Now, if this friend asks you for money and the first time you gave them money, they didn’t pay you back, the next time that they ask you for money, you would not want to give them money simply because they have shown that they are not willing to pay you back. So why would you give them money?
And things like that with this factor is this is just showing people that, hey, if you have a friend that says, Hey, can I borrow $5? Give ’em $5, the next day they give you $5 back, the next time they ask, you’ll be more willing to give that person $5. You know what I’m saying? And if they kept paying your money back on time without you having to ask for your $5 back, you will see, man, this person seems like he’s loyal. You know what I’m saying?
Like they’re not willing to make me ask for cause because one of the things that I hate the most is whenever you give somebody money and then they don’t offer to pay you back, and you have to keep asking them, Hey man, where’s my money, bro? Where’s my $5? I gave you $5 a month ago. I’ve been asking you every single Sunday, and you still not paying me my money <laugh> now? But that’s basically what the second factor is. The longer you have your credit card, it basically shows companies that you are making on time payments.
3rd Factor to Increase Your Credit Score
Now, I don’t wanna beat that down into the ground, but the third factor that really affects how to increase your credit score is how much credit do you utilize? All right, so this next factor is kind of complicated in a sense. What I plan on doing is making a second blog to where I go into more detail about these six factors.
But when it comes to credit utilization, what you want to do is if you have a credit limit of a hundred dollars, which simply means is the credit card company told you that we trust you with only a hundred dollars, and if you try to put more than a hundred dollars on this card, it will be declined. Now, if you take that credit limit in, you go out and make a purchase of $50, that simply means that you have used 50% of your limit.
That’s what the third factor is all about credit utilization. Now, what you wanna do to improve your credit card score is you want to keep that utilization percentage very low. What you wanna shoot for is a five to maybe 10, maybe 15% range. You know what I’m saying? So what that boils down to is with the example I just gave, if you have a hundred dollars limit, you only wanna have $5 showing up at the end of your statement every month or maybe even $15 showing up.
Now everybody has a different limit. And when I first started off, I only had a limit of I think a thousand dollars on one credit card. As you make on time payments and you have your credit card for a long time, the credit card company will extend your limit to where that $100 limit will change to a thousand dollars.
You know what I’m saying? So instead of it taking $50 to be able to utilize 50% of your credit card, it would take $500 to be able to utilize that. And that’s what you really want to do with a credit card is you wanna make small purchases and things like that. And the best advice that I was ever told was for my mom, she said, You don’t wanna swipe your credit card unless you already have the money in your bank account or cash in hand.
And the reason why you wanna do that is because you don’t wanna develop a habit or a mindset of just swiping your credit card blindly. You want to be able to know how much money you have and make sure you live within your means. Now, I could really go into detail about this point, but I don’t wanna make this blog more complicated than it needs to be.
4th Factor to Increase Your Credit Score
So let’s just go on to the fourth topic. All right? So the fourth thing is called recent inquiries. What this boils down to is whenever you go make a purchase of things like that, companies will check your credit score. So to break that down, in a practical terms, once I graduated college, the first thing I was like, Man, I need to buy. I need to buy a really good mattress. So I went to mattress firm, I got me a Tempur-Pedic, You know what I’m saying?
Because throughout college, I’m pretty sure some of you guys that are in college and stuff like that can vouch for me, you know what I’m saying? But man, those dorm mattresses suck. You know what I’m saying? To make it back hurt that you don’t get enough sleep. You know what I’m saying? So the first thing on my mind, I was like, I wanna buy me a mattress. When I went to go buy that mattress, they checked my credit score, and that simply went down as a recent inquiry.
Now, when it comes to credit, just to keep things simple, if I walk into the Mac store and I wanna buy that Apple computer when they check my credit score, it’s not gonna show that I have a recent inquiry because that’s the first time I’m trying to make a major purchase. But if I was to go out of that Mac store and then walk into the Gucci store,
But if I was to walk into the Gucci store and try to make a major purchase and try to use my credit card, now whenever I go to the front, the lady’s gonna check my credit score and it will show that I had a one recent inquiry because I just bought the laptop. That’s basically the principle of what recent inquiries are, and you really want to be able the space out your major purchases, especially if you’re gonna use a credit card, because the more recent inquiries that you have, the lower your score will be.
But that’s basically what it boils down to when it comes to recent inquiries. All right, so onto the fifth back, how to increase your credit score. Now, this one is similar to recent inquiries, and what this one deals around is how many new accounts have you created?
Now, once you make an account, it will go down on your credit card that you have opened up a credit with some kind of financial institution and things like that. If you go out and open a whole bunch of credit cards within a short time frame, that is gonna trigger a red flag.
The reason why they will show up as a red flag on your credit is because it will show people that, hey, this guy’s probably trying to get a whole bunch of credit limit because they’re trying to buy something that they can’t afford. You know what I’m saying? And a lot of financial institutions will either give you a higher interest whenever you buy something or they won’t allow you to purchase something using credit. All right? So for me, when I was in high school, I got my credit card through Capital One.
I went on to college and everything like that. Once I graduated, I told you guys that I wanted to buy that mattress. Once I bought that mattress, they offered me a credit card through Mattress Firm to be able to get a a cheaper discount on the mattress that I was buying. I was like, Look, it’s been almost six years since I’ve opened up a credit card and everything like that.\
Maybe it’s time for me to do this. Now, once I did that, it only counted as one new account on my history at the time. You know what I’m saying? Over time, I believe at the end of the year, something like that, like I said, every credit card company is different over a certain time period, they will reset your new accounts that you’ve opened. You know what I’m saying? So what you really want to do is space out when you open a new account.
And one little tip that I’ve learned is for me, instead of me closing my accounts, what I should have did was just simply shred up the credit cards. You know what I’m saying? Because what will happen is any credit that you built up, any score that you built up on that credit card, once you cancel it, it will go away. You know what I’m saying? So if you cancel your very first credit card, lenders will have to go off of your most recent credit card that you’ve opened up. You know what I’m saying? So, but I don’t wanna get too much into details of Ed. Let’s go on to the last and sixth factor.
6th Factor to Increase Your Credit Score
All right? So the last and sixth factor is basically what I’ve been talking about this whole entire time, and that revolves around the subject of available credit. All right? Now, the reason why this is important is because when I first started off with my credit card, I only had a thousand dollars on that Capital One card that I told you guys about. Over time, as I made on time payments, I kept my credit card open. I didn’t have a lot of recent inquiries and things like that. I kept my credit utilization down. What Capital One decided to do was say, Hey,
Jay Lu, we see that you’ve been doing everything right. What we wanna do is extend your credit limits. So you can probably make bigger purchases and things like that because we see that you’re getting older, we see that you’re taking care of your finances and stuff like that. So let’s extend your credit limit.
That’s one way you can extend your credit limit. And the only way you can raise this score is by having a huge credit limit. I believe you have to have at least $50,000 on a credit limit to be able to get an excellent score. But if you guys are young, don’t rush to do that because like I told you already, once you are making on time payments, you have your credit card for a very long time, you don’t have a lot of recent inquiries, you’re not doing all these bad things, your lender will extend your credit limit.
And when you get older, and when you really do need to make those purchases, you can’t open up new accounts to where they won’t affect your score to allow yourself to increase your credit limit. And even for me, I’m up in age, but I still haven’t reached that that $50,000 limit, you know what I’m saying?
Because I’m not rushing it. My credit score already is dang near almost at 800, you know what I’m saying? And when you have a high credit score that allows you to be able to get a lower interest on the major things that you wanna purchase. So take your time, because for me, one thing that I’ve learned is when I did, when I wanted to buy my first car, when I went to the dealership, the first thing they looked at was my background on my credit, because my credit score was so high, they only wanted to charge me the lowest interest rate possible.
And with interest rates, the only thing that you guys need to keep in mind is you want to have a very small interest rate. Because what that says is if you make a purchase of a hundred dollars and you have an interest rate of 5% every month that goes by and you don’t pay off that, that balance, it adds 5% every single month.
So if you don’t pay off the whole balance the first month, you’ll have $105 total the next month, and it keeps going up. You know what I’m saying? So just in short, the main thing that you guys wanna keep in mind is you want to increase your credit score. Because whenever you go make major purchases, it allows you to make those major purchases and they will offer you deals as having small interest rates.
Or they’ll say, Hey, well we won’t charge you interest for the first year, or whatever the case is. And a funny little story with you guys is, I remember the first time I went to go buy a handgun, You know what I’m saying? I live in Texas. I know a lot of people have different beliefs when it comes to guns and stuff like that, but down here in Texas, that’s just something that we do, You know?
So when I went to go buy my first gun, what they did was they ran a background check and they also check my credit. He basically sent out a request saying, Hey, I need J Lu’s credit score and things like that. Within two to five minutes, it came back. Now, when my credit score came back that fast, the dude was shook. He literally told me, he was like, Man, you must have a one credit. Because it went through like that.
Every time I make major purchases, when I bought my mattress, when I bought my car, when I I bought my gun, any major purchases that I made, people would always say, Man, you must have amazing credit, because it didn’t take no time in order for me to get a response back based of your credit score. So that’s a practical little short story time for you guys.
You know what I’m saying? It’s your boy Jay Lew. I don’t wanna keep this blog too drawn out. I do wanna make a second blog to go into more detail. If you guys want that, make sure you leave comments down below and make sure you spam that light button. I appreciate all the support. I appreciate every single view. I appreciate every single person that joins the JustinTime squad.
Because at the end of the day, it is not only about having elite waves, that’s not the goal for me, the goal is having an elite life, and that’s what I want for all my subscribers as well. So if you want more content like this and things like that, or you wanna hear about my perspective more when it comes to financial things, y’all already know what to do. But it’s your boy J Lu salute.
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