The Road to 850: Proven Strategies for Increasing Your Credit Score – Book review

A few weeks ago I ran into an old friend. While we caught each other up on what had been happening since we last saw one another, he asked what I did. This question led to his sharing credit-score issues he’s grappling with, specifically how to maintain and keep his score high and avoid the fluctuations many of us experience when we monitor our reports.

Around the same time, a book came across my desk for review, The Road to 850: Proven Strategies for Increasing Your Credit Score by Al Bingham (Paladin Press). Many books explain credit scores, but I prefer suggesting books on complicated topics such as credit scores and reporting to be simple and easily digestible to novices. More importantly, it should allow the reader to take simple actions, although some are not easy, toward hitting their particular goal. The Road to 850 seemed like it might be that type of book.

In 1995, credit scores were made officially available, and 850 is the highest score that reporting agencies give to represent creditworthiness. The author begins the book by explaining the cost of your credit score. Nowadays your credit score can affect everything from your job and career choices to what you’ll pay for insurance. For example, a score of 680 could cost you about $20,000 more than an 850 score on your home mortgage. The same difference can add an extra $150 annually to your insurance premium.

The book mentions the three major reporting agencies, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, and explains what gets reported to them and what they report. It gives insight into how your score is derived. Each line is well explained to make sense out of a report that can look confusing.

Confusion of credit scores is common, and for good reason. Even if you know your score and are familiar with how to read your report, there are additional credit-scoring models that may show you one score when you’re at home and another when your lender pulls a report for you. To keep confusion to a minimum, the author recommends that you use one service for your credit-score monitoring, just to see how you much your score has gone up or down.

It’s been widely noted that inquiries from various financial institutions may affect your score. The author explains how reporting agencies classify inquiries by who made them, whether it is a bank, utility company, mortgage lender, finance company, or others. Multiple inquirers have minimal impact on your score, but when you shop for a home or car, auto and mortgage inquiries can be handled differently from other inquiries. The classic model gives fourteen days to choose financing when you are shopping for a car or home.

The author recognizes how life events may have an affect on your score. He goes into details on events such as moving, divorce, foreclosure, and bankruptcy, among others. He gives healthy caution on the use of credit-repair companies, because some can do more harm than good.

Finally The Road to 850 lists the credit score codes, the sometimes-cryptic sentences that accompany a report, and enlightens us on their true meaning. He also strongly recommends that you contact a service professional with matters that pertain to you specifically.

After heading down The Road to 850, I’ve found it is a book I’ll refer to my old friend. Take a look for yourself. It’s worth it.