Mortgage 101 – Know Your Credit

Would you bet your house you know exactly what’s happening with your credit? In this episode, Clinton and Todd emphasized the importance of monitoring credit reports, correcting errors, and being cautious when sharing credit card information online.

Todd Veinotte
All right, welcome back to Mortgage 101, your guide to homeownership, with Clinton Wilkins and myself, Todd Veinotte!

Clinton Wilkins
It’s pride and homeownership! Yeah. We had a really great chat with Blair. I thought that was awesome. You know, I think overall, we’ve really moved the needle so far in Nova Scotia, Halifax, in the in the queer community, but pride is still so important. So, you know, thank you, everyone for listening to what we had to say. And absolutely, I think there’s gonna be a lot of positive outlook after this festival. It’s really still all about education.

Todd Veinotte
Okay. And speaking of education, I wanted to talk to you about credit and the launching off point is because of a new story this week with Ticketmaster. They had a big security breach. And they’re offering people impacted a year of credit surveillance with some credit card companies. And you’ve talked about these credit companies. So that’s disconcerting. If you get a letter or an email from from Ticketmaster.

Clinton Wilkins
It could happen anywhere. You know, there’s been breaches in the province of Nova Scotia. There has been absolutely. And there have been other big breaches here in Canada, as well as internationally, obviously. It’s a challenge. I think it’s tough to secure your data now. And some of it is intentional breaches. Some of it is, unintentional. And I think that everyone needs to be cognizant, I think it’s important to monitor your credit, no matter if you’ve been breached, or you haven’t been breached. And there’s credit monitoring out there at a cost. I’d recommend people monitor their Equifax as well as their TransUnion, they both offer monthly monitoring, it has a cost. So you need to decide if it’s going to be worth the cost to you. You can monitor it yourself for free, there are two free apps out there. There’s Borrowell, which monitors your Equifax, and there is Credit Karma that monitors your TransUnion. So the reason that you need both, is there’s two different credit reporting agencies in Canada. And, you know, if you download these free apps, just prepare yourself, you’re going to try to be sold some credit stuff, you don’t need to buy it, just use their services for free. And if you want to buy something great, you know, that’s how they monetize their business, because these apps are free.

Todd Veinotte
So when you sign up for the app, what information do you have to give them, do you have to give them all your information directly? This is me being paranoid in a way with all of this stuff, because I just don’t know who to trust or what to trust. And can you trust anyone? Websites are cloned, AI all of this stuff. So what advice you give people?

Clinton Wilkins
Not every app from the App Store is, is trustworthy. By and large, I think, if you’re downloading from Apple, their App Store, or the Android app store, these are somewhat vetted apps, I can confirm Borrowell and Credit Karma are, fine. But if you don’t want to risk downloading an app, you can go to the TransUnion and the Equifax website, and you can request your credit bureau yourself. But if you want to sign up for the monthly monitoring, they do have a few different packages, you know, it’s $10 -$20 a month for each service. And that is a lot of cost if you’re not really willing to spend it or you might not have the money to spend it. So that’s why I think Borrowell and Credit Karma are a good solution. If you are, you know, comfortable doing that type of thing. For me, I use Borrowell and Credit Karma myself, I don’t pay for the credit monitoring, and they send you an update every week. Every week they send you an update, they show you if there’s any inquiries, they show you what’s reported on your credit bureau, you can basically see your full, credit report on their apps and there’s no cost.

Todd Veinotte
What recourse do you have if you’re seeing some activity that you do not feel is accurate?

Clinton Wilkins
I would call the credit the credit reporting agency.

Todd Veinotte
Are they accessible?

Clinton Wilkins
Yeah, you can call Equifax and call TransUnion they do have a credit dispute line. They have a consumer hotline that you can call and you can put in an investigation for a consumer to do it, it does take some time. We do as a mortgage broker have our own service through Equifax business services where I can do an investigation, if there’s something wrong on someone’s report, we often see this for people that maybe previously bankrupt, or maybe had a consumer proposal or maybe had a collection item, we can get the documentation and then we can do an investigation, it comes at a cost, this is not free. But we can do an investigation. And we can correct that credit bureau. Normally it takes between two and 30 days for the credit bureau to be corrected; which sometimes can be much faster than if a consumer goes and tries to do it themselves. Oftentimes, if the consumer tries to do it, it’s 30 days plus, sometimes it can be two or three months. And you really need to have the right documentation to get a good investigation done.

Todd Veinotte
Yeah. So beyond all of that, and we’ve talked about this many, many times on the show. Some of the other things that you can do is you can look at your bank account on a daily basis, your factions, you can go online, and you can look at your credit card, what’s transacting online.

Clinton Wilkins
I’ve had my credit card stolen before. Yeah, but I called the bank, there was $6,000 worth of cash advances off my Visa card, I called the bank, and they instantly reversed them all. They stopped the card, they courriered me a new card, which was awesome. But it’s not the same if your debit card gets breached. If your debit card gets breached, and money gets debited from your account, sometimes that can take a really long time to go back, if at all. I mean, because that is real cash, where with a credit card, there’s a lot of different insurance and stuff that’s built in there.

Todd Veinotte
Just this week, I went to book a tee time at a golf course. And they wanted a credit card number, because they’re so busy, golf courses are so busy right now that when people don’t show, they want to be able to charge them, of course, which is good. But the girl asked me for my credit card number over the phone, which I did give her.

Clinton Wilkins
Are they keying into a system, are they writing it down on a piece of paper? That piece of paper could go anywhere.

Todd Veinotte
And I had concerns, I gotta be honest with you afterwards, I thought that person could do anything with that information.

Clinton Wilkins
And that’s why you need to be smart, especially when you’re going online. When you’re going online and you’re going to enter your credit card information, you should look at the URL and make sure it says HTTPS. You should also look at the URL and see if there’s a little lock symbol beside the URL. That means that website is safe or safer than just a generic site. And they would have security on that site specifically to make sure that consumers are protected. Oftentimes in Canada, the websites that we use every day are very secure. You know, there are other solutions with not entering your credit card online. Oftentimes, places that you might buy from online will offer you to either put in your credit card information, or do the transaction through a trusted partner like PayPal, or PayPal, you can log in, it’s a portal, kind of like your online banking, and it can be hooked up to your credit card or your bank, and it can debit that account. Or you can put money into PayPal, and that is more secure in some ways. So for those of you that are not comfortable putting your credit card online, it’s a good solution. But again, you know, be careful when you use your debit card and look at where you’re gonna go use it. ATMs can be duped and like they can have a little card reader on the ATM and the ATM might work like normal, but scanning all your information when the debit card goes in. So really, my recommendation is, use your credit card, there’s a lot of more layers of protection on a credit card than there is a debit card, really use your debit card at a bank branch or an ATM. But that’s it, I would use credit cards for everything else. But you need to make sure that when you’re using the credit card, if you’re using it smartly, nobody wants to pay interest, use the bank’s money during your statement period and then pay it off every month. But remember when that statement generates, don’t go above 30% or 35% of your limit, otherwise it will impact your credit score. Again, if you can, 30%- 35% of the limit of your credit card, don’t go above it when the statement generates, and whatever it shows on the statement will show on your credit bureau. So if you know you did a lot of charges throughout the month, make sure that you do a payment before your statement generates.

Todd Veinotte
I get it I get it totally okay. All right. Listen, a lot of information out there. How do people get a hold of you?

Clinton Wilkins
Visit us online at Teamclinton.ca/radio. We have hundreds of blog posts on there. We’re gonna have blog posts for pride, you’re gonna want to see Todd, we’re gonna be able to see our show here Mortgage 101 as it rolls out. You can also see us on social media, all the links on our social accounts are from the website. And we’d love to hear from you. We’d love to hear any feedback that you have for us from our show. And if you did, there’s anything you want us to talk about on the show. Feel free to reach out to us anytime!

Todd Veinotte
Absolutely Clinton, Always a pleasure my friend thank you so much!