Credit building services are geared toward helping consumers with their credit history. They could be solutions for this: consumers who suffer a hair-trigger decline of credit scores. This person’s experience illustrates the situation:

20 years of never missing a payment. Spend $5K a month on my “normal” card and pay off in full every month. Opened a new card last year but never used…except for one an Adobe Photoshop auto-pay I set up and promptly forgot about that hit annually for $129 a few months back. Apparently I never had electronic notification set up…and in a bad stroke of luck I moved this year and so I never got the bill. By the time I realized it was late it was past 60 days…paid it off but my first late payment ever in my entire life dropped my credit score from 769 to 652!

Consider that anecdote. Years and years of being a good payer, and one slip-up tanks the score. It reminds me of a saying I use with my kids: “Trust: hard to earn, easy to lose.”

Lest you think this was an isolated case, a number of people have reported the same experience. I was alerted to the hair-trigger nature of credit scores by a friend. She had a sterling score, missed a payment on accident, and her score dropped 110 points. I wondered if others had encountered this, and found many had. Some examples from Reddit and MyFICO:

I don’t doubt that the credit score models have good empirical validation for dropping scores this much upon a missed payment. I’m sure there are plenty of cases where that first missed payment was just the tip of the iceberg for what was coming.

But for those consumers who are good risks but had a simple mistake, there ought to be recourse for rehabilitating their credit scores. That’s where the nascent credit building field comes in. Every credit building vendor I’ve come across includes reporting payments to the credit bureaus. Adding positive payment history to your credit record seems a reasonable approach when one has a missed payment.

Do the credit building services work? Let’s stipulate that there are no guarantees of improvement. But, here are the words of some who saw a benefit from four different credit building services:

• “I’ve had the app since October 2nd and it’s December 26th and I’ve gained 106 points just by paying literally $2 a freaking month.”
• “Definitely worth it. Credit went up 70 points this past month.”
• “My credit took a hit after I had some medical hardships. It has helped me go from a 550 credit score to a 650.”
• “I’ve been amazed at the difference that this has made! My credit score has increased 59 points in three months and I’m just doing what I have been doing for years.”

For consumers who suffered a decline in their credit scores over a missed payment, credit building services could be a way to fight back.

Click here to find out how Scorenomics BoostMyScore^® provides consumers with appropriate credit building services for their situation.

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