Secrets Of The 800+ Club

Dinkins's second straight-talking financial advice publication (the follow-up to 2015's One Bucket at a Time: A Woman's Guide to Creating Wealth) affirms her zeal for truth-telling and protecting her audience from scams. Dinkins was inspired to create the guide when she witnessed a sales pitch from a speaker at an Atlanta Wealth and Wine event who didn't seem to care much about the problem so many Americans are having with their credit. Dinkins wasn't having it. People are taking advantage of others' misfortune and lack of knowledge, she laments. She vowed to craft an affordable alternative for readers eager to better understand and manage their credit scores. Her clear-eyed guide demystifies the world of credit agencies, delineates which activities can affect a consumer's score, and lays out well-defined and concise steps they can take to improve their credit ratings--from savvily timing payments to using only a small percentage of available credit. Dinkins is adamant, in her warm and approachable way, that readers should never pay hundreds of dollars to third-party companies to monitor and improve their credit scores. The title, of course, refers to Dinkins's own hard-won and much treasured credit score. She details how she achieved a rating above 800 and the advantages that elite ranking affords her. But her book's appeal is not just for those aspiring to the top of the heap; it is also relevant to everyday earners. Your three-digit credit score stands between you and a yes or no to many of life's pleasures, she notes, and she's frank and persuasive about the urgency of improving one's score, limiting debt, and creating wealth. Her action steps for achieving this are clear and practical. Readers seeking the financial freedom that comes with a high credit score will value the hard-work attitude and easy-to-follow suggestions in this authoritative guide. Takeaway: This guide to credit score boosting is comprehensive, detailed, and empowering. Great for fans of: Lynnette Khalfani-Cox's Perfect Credit: 7 Steps to a Great Credit Rating, Anthony Davenport's Your Score: An Insider's Secrets to Understanding, Controlling, and Protecting Your Credit Score. Production grades Cover: A- Design and typography: A Illustrations: A- Editing: B+ Marketing copy: A A comprehensive guide to understanding your personal credit score and improving it. This latest from professional financial advisor Dinkins, the author of One Bucket at a Time (2015), concentrates on the core element of personal finance: the individual credit score. Right from the start of this book, the author stresses its overwhelming importance: The score not only determine[s] the type of mail that comes to our boxes, but it also determines the price we pay for our homes and cars, and even whether we receive a loan if we want to start a business, she writes. She points out that some people are so desperate to clean up their score that they're willing to pay exorbitant fees at credit-renovation seminars to do so, but she assures her readers that this isn't strictly necessary ( Credit repair companies do not have a magic bullet ); instead, she shows, in this book, how people can do a lot to help fix their credit scores themselves. Dinkins writes about all of this with simple, encouraging clarity and inviting notes of humor (at one point noting I think I've stressed this point ad nauseam, don't you think? ). A great amount of valuable information is compressed into fewer than 130fast-moving pages. In that small space, the author explains to readers what credit is, how it works, why it's important, and how to establish it at the beginning of one's financial life; she also informatively reveals the natures of scams that guarantee quick credit renovation. In addition, she earnestly tells readers that there's little room for compromise when a credit score decreases: If you have an 800+ credit score, your score can drop fifty points and you will still receive great rates on credit, she writes. If you have a 750 credit score and your score drops 50 points, you are no longer considered an excellent borrower. An intelligently organized and optimistic guide to repairing one's credit. --Kirkus Reviews