Creating a Customized Plan to Reach Your Goal Credit Score

Disclaimer: This article was sponsored by TransUnion. I received a free demo and a free trial of the product to use for a month and am being provided compensation for my review of the product. All thoughts and opinions are my own. My experience is my own, and your experience may differ. Thank you for supporting the brands that make this blog possible.

I remember the feeling of being denied for credit at the most inconvenient times – like the time I landed my first job right out of college. I found an apartment and moved in with a roommate right away. It was exciting to finally start living like an adult.

We both needed bedroom furniture and went to the same place to apply for credit accounts in order to get it. My roommate was approved right away. Sadly, I was denied. I slept on the floor for a few months until I had the cash for a mattress and frame.

On other occasions, I’d be approved for the credit I needed but was given subprime interest rates and would end up paying much more in interest than my credit-worthy counterparts.

My credit score was low and I had no idea how to fix it. Because I didn’t know what made up my credit score or how to fix it, I spent years floundering around in the dark and suffering from all the consequences of having a lower credit score. I didn’t have time to discern the seemingly mysterious credit process so I would eventually give up trying.

At one point, my husband and I even cut up all our credit cards as we decided to live without debt and credit — partially because we really didn’t understand how it all worked and had problems abusing it in the past.

Today, we still avoid debt but tend to use our credit cards wisely by paying off the balance each month and using the rewards to cover things like travel or business-related investments. Recently, our improved credit score helped us get a construction loan to start our real estate investing business.

These options are available to us only because we eventually made a conscious decision to take control of our credit situation and improve our credit health. It wasn’t easy but we finally got there.

Customizing your credit path

If you’re on a path to improve your credit health, you might be frustrated like we were with the process. After all, there’s an abundance of “one size fits all” advice claiming to help everyone reach their ideal credit score.

Sure, the blanket advice can be a good place to start but what if your personal credit situation is very unique and requires a different approach? That’s when the general, yet well-meaning, advice can fall short.

For example, you might have an excellent history of paying on time but your lower score may actually reflect a lack of variety in the types of credit accounts you have. You could also have a short credit history or lack enough accounts open to garner a better score. There are so many possibilities, so where do you start? Figuring out a plan to improve your credit behaviors will help guide you toward building your credit health.

If you’re not sure exactly what’s keeping your credit score low, trying to achieve your credit goals can seem like a shot in the dark. It doesn’t have to be that way anymore.

Studying millions to create a customized approach

Imagine someone studying your unique personal credit profile and comparing it to the actions and successful credit experiences of millions of people in situations like yours to create a personalized, unique plan to reach your credit goals.

The good news is that now you don’t have to imagine it: CreditCompass™* is a new product from TransUnion that gives specific recommendations to reach your goal credit score based on your credit information as well as data points from millions of people who successfully improved their credit in similar situations over a 24-month period. Basically, it’s a personalized model for achieving your credit goals based on proven examples.

Imagine finally being empowered to take control of your own financial destiny with an actionable plan that can help you reach your credit score goal. This is exactly what CreditCompass can do for you.

What is CreditCompass?

CreditCompass is included in a TransUnion Credit Monitoring subscription, which helps keep you informed about your credit score, overall credit health and provides useful educational content. CreditCompass is also powered by the VantageScore® 3.0 model. I think this is good news for credit-conscious consumers everywhere.

Why? According to the VantageScore website, the VantageScore 3.0 credit scoring model can provide credit scores to people who might be excluded by traditional credit scoring models like consumers who don’t have a long credit history or who use credit infrequently. This means an additional 30-35 million individuals can be scored.

How does CreditCompass work?

In a nutshell, CreditCompass gives you clear and immediate action steps to achieve your goal credit score. CreditCompass works alongside a suite of tools designed to put you in control of your credit as part of the TransUnion Credit Monitoring subscription, which includes information like your daily TransUnion Score & Report updates, 3-Bureau Monitoring, Instant Alerts, Credit Lock Plus, and more.

Though CreditCompass is powerful, it’s important to know that it doesn’t yet work for people with a VantageScore below 400 or higher than 750. The data that drives the recommendations don’t include scores outside of this range at this time, but it could in future iterations of the tool.

If you fall within the proper VantageScore range, your personalized plan will give you specific actions you can take that will have a positive impact on your credit score. If you’ve got a subscription to TransUnion Credit Monitoring, you’ll see CreditCompass in your dashboard as soon as you log in.

Here’s an example of what you’d see when you log in:

From here, you can choose the compass icon and slide it over to your goal score to get information on how to improve your credit health:

Once you do this, you’ll get a personalized set of recommendations that can help you achieve your goal credit score over a two year period. The recommendations are based on your unique situation.

Here’s an example of recommendations you might receive based on your credit score goal:

As you can see, CreditCompass gives you a set of recommendations that can help get you from point A (your starting credit score) to point B (your desired credit score). The good news is that the recommendations are based your unique credit situation, and the real experiences of millions of people who were once in a similar situation and improved their credit health over time.

Whatever you need to do to achieve your goal score, the neat part is that you now have the know-how and power to actually do it by implementing the recommendations that CreditCompass gives you!

What a game changer this would have been for us while we were attempting to improve our credit health!

Bottom line

Building your credit health doesn’t have to be a shot in the dark. Now, you can know what may work for you based on proven actions that have worked for millions of people like you — but customized enough for your unique credit situation. The power to change your credit destiny has never been so simple-to-use and easy-to-access with CreditCompass from TransUnion.

*There are various types of credit scores, and lenders use a variety of different types of credit scores to make lending decisions. The credit score you receive and the one used for CreditCompass is based on the VantageScore 3.0 model and may not be the credit score model used by your lender.