Hello, and welcome to Passive Real Estate Investing. I'm your host Marco Santarelli. Today we have another great episode today is about your credit score and your credit profile. Something very important as you know, because the better your credit, the better financing in terms you get on your loans, whether it be mortgage financing or for car loans or appliances or furniture or whatever it might be, even for renting. I mean, a lot of landlords will pull your credit to see what the risk factors are preventing you from making timely payments every month to them. So credit is incredibly important. It's something you should build and protect. And my guest today is gonna talk about what credit is, how it works, how to build it and protect it, and some of the hacks to improve it. Some of them are quick. So you might wanna stick around to the very end of this episode and listen to some of the quick hacks that allow you to boost your credit and quickly with that. Let us get to our interview with Todd and I hope you learn a lot from today's episode.

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Well, it is my honor to have a special guest today. His name is Todd Wilson. Todd is a loan officer, but he's also a credit expert. He teaches people how to take control of their credit. He's the author of a great book called Crack the Credit Code. I love that title. Todd spent two decades learning about credit and after experiencing the effects of not knowing enough about it, he really made it his mission to research all the smallest details about credit and how it works. So with that, Todd, welcome to the show.

Thank you. How are you Marco?

Doing great. It's great having you on. And there was a lot of fun chatting with you before this recording. I'm kind of excited to dive into the meat and potatoes of this topic because everybody has one common denominator and that is they have a credit profile and they have a credit score. Most people don't know how it works, how to build it or how to destroy it. They probably know how, how to destroy it better than they know how to build it. but you know, it's something that we've talked about in the years past on the show. And I just think it's well worth revisiting, especially at a greater depth with you, because it's something that we need. It's important if we're gonna take control of our financial lives or we're gonna be borrowing capital to invest in real estate or whatever it might be. So I really think this is an important topic for everybody to listen to this touches everybody. It's not one of those things where I might be interested in promissory notes, or I might be interested in real estate, or I might be interested in this or that this impacts everybody. So with that, why don't you tell us about yourself? How did you get into this whole credit expert space? What was your journey?

Well, starting out as a loan officer, I had to learn about credit to begin with and, you know, everything was going pretty well as I was learning about credit and improv my own and then 2008 hit and it hit me pretty much as hard as it had hit anybody at all. I mean, you know, I went through bankruptcy, foreclosure, you know, lost everything. And I decided at that point, credit kind of got me into that mess. So I wasn't gonna use credit anymore. And so I didn't use credit for about three years and I realized how much that was actually holding me back because I couldn't buy a house. I couldn't buy a car, couldn't even rent a car or get a hotel room without a lot of trouble. So I decided that I had to get back into the credit game, but I didn't know how to do it.

And so I decided to ask a bunch of other people who were in the same industry, cuz I figured they know about credit too.