The blog
Plain-English guides to phone lookups, credit scores, tenant and lead screening, and doing it all by the book.
66 articles
Co-signing means the lender can come to you for every dollar. Before you sign, here's what to look at in the borrower's credit (with their permission), what to ask the lender, and how to protect yourself if you go ahead.
Credit advice treats every mistake as equally scary. It isn't. A bankruptcy and a hard inquiry are in completely different leagues. What really moves a FICO score, ranked from most damaging to least, and how long each one sticks around.
Most wasted showings are predictable. Here's a simple, fair-housing-safe workflow to pre-screen tenants by text and phone number before anyone drives over, including the exact messages to send.
A synthetic identity can have a 750 credit score and no actual human behind it. The giveaways are rarely in one place. They show up when you compare the phone number, the name and the shape of the credit file.
Most brokers sort leads by when they came in. The ones who close more sort them by whether they can actually fund. Here's a simple, written scoring model built on a consented soft pull, with worked examples.
The area code and prefix tell you which carrier a number started with, not which one it's on today. How carrier lookups really work, why porting breaks the cheap ones, and what the answer is good for.
No score doesn't mean bad credit. It usually means not enough credit, and tens of millions of U.S. adults are in that spot. What a thin credit file is, why some files can't be scored, and how to size up someone who doesn't have a score.
The simplest legal reason to check someone's credit is that they said yes in writing. Here's a copy-ready consent template, what each line is for, and how to collect consent by text, email or e-signature without making it awkward.
On most big remodels, you're carrying the homeowner's money before they carry yours. Here's how contractors can check a client's credit with permission, read the results, and structure draws so one bad client can't sink a season.
Most credit score API evaluations focus on the demo and skip the parts that hurt later: which score you actually get, what a no-hit costs, and how consent is recorded. Here's the checklist we'd use.
Seven ways to put a name to a phone number, ranked by how often they're actually right. Includes the free tricks that work, the ones that waste your time, and the one you should never try.
Credit utilization is the share of your card limits you're using, and it moves scores faster than anything else you control. The famous 30% line is a rough guide. Here's what scoring models actually see.
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