Maintaining a strong credit score is one of the most important financial goals for most Americans, especially if you regularly use your credit card or even if you want to take out a big loan or mortgage. However, it may take years to build a strong credit score. That does not necessarily have to be the case thanks to Experian Boost.
Experian introduced a feature called Experian Boost, which is designed to make Americans improve their credit score with relative ease. It allows customers to link their bank accounts to include extra on-time payments on to their credit report. This move improves the user’s credit history on the FICO 8 credit score as per Experian’s credit score model.
The process is also rather easy. The first key step is to link your main checking account, which you use to pay for your phone bills and utilities. Fortunately, it does not include the user’s negative payment history, and your credit boost results are provided instantly. Experian claims on its website that around 1.3 million people have gone through the process and that roughly 840,000of them experienced an increase in their FICO scores.
People that have an Experian account can access Experian Boost for free. Note that Experian Boost does not access funds in your account, but it does have access to read-only data. It also allows users to exclude payments that they do not want to add to the system. You can thus decide which payments to include and which ones to exclude, and this gives flexibility to users. The system checks the user history as far back as 24 months, although the minimum payment history is three months.
Experian Boost also has a premium version through which users pay a monthly amount of $25, although the fee for the first month is $5. Some of the premium version features include daily score alerts, identity theft monitoring, and a creditlock feature through which users can lock or unlock their files. This makes Experian Boost not only a great way of boosting your credit score but also a good means of monitoring your finances.
