Ryan Alexander Reveals Top Credit Hacks to Boost Your Score

Ryan Alexander (00:00)
So my main focus is the.

to be able to teach people the best and fastest ways to build and structure 800 credit profiles with $100,000 credit limits and enough points and miles turning everyday expenses into worldly experiences by using credit cards, points and rewards wisely and responsibly. So the more we can educate people in the credit system, I always say money makes life easier, credit makes money

Michelle Kesil (01:55)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Investor Fuel podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil. And today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with, Ryan Alexander, who’s been making serious moves in the credit space. So really glad to have you here with us, Ryan. I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how your

teaching people how to work with credit and leverage it to their advantage. So let’s dive in.

Ryan Alexander (02:32)
Cool, thanks Michelle. I’m excited to be here and hopefully everybody grabs a quick cup of coffee, glass of water and puts their seatbelt on because this is going to be fun and really entertaining.

Michelle Kesil (02:40)
Yes, buckle up. So first off for people who may not be familiar with you and your world, give us the short version. What’s your main focus these days?

Ryan Alexander (02:42)
I love it.

So my main focus is the.

to be able to teach people the best and fastest ways to build and structure 800 credit profiles with $100,000 credit limits and enough points and miles turning everyday expenses into worldly experiences by using credit cards, points and rewards wisely and responsibly. So the more we can educate people in the credit system, I always say money makes life easier, credit makes money

So if we can educate people on how the financial system works because it’s not taught in schools, it’s not taught in banks, it’s not really taught hardly anywhere, if I can

create a platform and or an environment, a community to help educate society. The ripple effect will enable more people to buy houses, start businesses and travel and see the world.

Michelle Kesil (03:35)
Amazing. yeah, like what’s step one for someone that doesn’t have knowledge in this?

Ryan Alexander (03:42)
So the hardest thing about this, everybody, when people say what’s the number one step with regards to building credit, and it has nothing to do with credit, it’s build a budget. Because people don’t really understand how much money they make and what they’re actually spending money on or how much they’re actually spending. Too many people, and I always say if you really want to be nauseous, anybody who carries credit card debt, go look at how much you paid in interest last month. If you want to get pissed off, go look at the interest you paid last month because you carried a balance.

That’s what people don’t understand and realize. So when you build a budget and you realize that you should never carry credit card balances, credit cards are not an extension of income. Building a budget will help you prevent that because if you use your credit card and my number one, I’m just going to throw the biggest credit tip, trick and secret that I teach every single day. P-T-Z-W, pay to zero weekly. Pay your credit cards to zero weekly. People don’t realize that one simple trick when,

somebody came to you and borrowed a hundred bucks, do want them to pay you back in one week or in four weeks? The answer is one week. Building a budget will help you pay your credit cards off every single week and that prevents you from paying 24 % interest on your credit cards. So when you start building that budget, it sets you up for everything else because then you can start learning about credit,

can start understanding how the factors work, but it all stems from the budget and being able to manage your money properly on a monthly basis.

Michelle Kesil (05:54)
Yeah, okay, so what if someone doesn’t know this and they’re like, well, I have a lot of debts. ⁓ I’m already past that point. Like, what would you say to that person?

Ryan Alexander (06:05)
So what I would say first is A, let’s look at what your budget looks like. How much money do you actually make? And then in the expense column, there’s two columns. There’s needs, mortgage or rent.

car payment or insurance, cell phone, food for kids, whatever the case may be. And then there’s once. There’s groceries, and then there’s Chick-fil-A, DoorDash, and Starbucks. There’s a huge difference between the two of those, and many people don’t know how much they spend on those things until they literally go through line by line. So once they create that budget and look and say, okay, here’s how much money I’m making, here’s what my hard expenses are.

Where can I trim the fat and how can I now then pay off my debts? And paying off your debts is gonna come down to how can I restructure the debt? Because many people are sitting, I I have people with eight, 10, 15 credit cards and they all have a balance, carried balance.

What I do is I teach them, okay, what can we do with the smallest amount of money out of pocket to pay down some of those debts, to boost our credit score the highest it could possibly be, and then restructure the debt with hybrid models between loans and or 0 % interest credit cards. Because many people think 0 % interest credit cards are the answer. Well, that’s not really any good if you max out that credit card and your credit score takes another hit because now you’re stuck and trapped. And at some point in time, you’ll have to refinance or get another balance transfer card.

another one and then all you do is you just keep kicking that can down the road but you never solve a problem or get rid of the actual issue.

Michelle Kesil (07:33)
Okay, interesting. And yeah, how do people actually raise their credit score?

Ryan Alexander (07:40)
So the best ways to raise credit scores, really, it comes down to, so the credit scoring system itself comes down to five factors. Payment history, do you pay people on time? Okay, we’re talking about anything that reports in your credit report,

Student loans, personal loans, auto loans, home loans, and credit cards. They’re the five type of accounts. Okay? So the first thing is payment history. The second thing is how do you manage your credit cards? If you don’t manage credit cards wisely, which is credit card utilization, 30 % of your credit score comes from managing credit cards. Many people, let me ask you this question. Do you think having more credit cards is better or less credit cards? What do you think? Less? Right, you would think that.

Michelle Kesil (08:14)
Plus.

Ryan Alexander (08:18)
It’s the opposite. The scoring algorithm works differently. The second thing is this. People rack up credit card debt and they may pay in full.

The problem is this, what people don’t know is even if you pay your credit cards in full, but you report a high usage, right, credit utilization, how much credit do you have, how much are you using, even if you use 60 % and you paid in full every single month, that usage is what causes your score to drop. So once again, by teaching people to pay their credit cards to zero every single week.

it reduces that utilization. Then you have the age of credit history. Credit cards are the only type of accounts and there is a huge difference between credit cards, well we’ll say credit cards, and charge cards. Charge cards don’t have credit limits. Doesn’t mean you can spend as much as you want. It just means they don’t have a reported credit limit that goes in your credit report. Credit cards do. So you want to build a portfolio of the right credit cards and then that will help naturally lower your utilization. Because if you only have one

credit card at $3,000, 10 % of $3,000, I don’t care what anybody says or tells you. You do not ever report more than 9 % on your credit cards. 9%. Most people will tell you 30%. The answer is 9%. It’s gotta be less than 9%, below 5 % is the sweet spot. By having more credit cards and more credit limits, I’m not suggesting this to everybody, I have 21 personal credit cards and 7 business credit cards.

I have a quarter million dollars of personal credit limits and over a million dollars of business credit limits. I’m not telling everybody’s got to do that, but the more credit limits you have and the lower you keep your usage, the more banks and lenders are going to look and say, man, this Michelle girl, she’s great. She’s a low risk borrower. She’s got lots of opportunity.

And the more credit cards you have, the more banks compete for your business.

So having all these things in mind, paying on time, low utilization, building old age of credit history, it’s the simplest, best, and fastest way to boost your credit score over time. Can you tell them a little energetic and passionate about what I do?

Michelle Kesil (10:55)
Yeah, but that makes it entertaining.

Ryan Alexander (10:59)
I told you it was going to be entertaining for you.

Michelle Kesil (11:02)
Awesome. So what if someone is stuck, like they have a lot of debt and they’re overwhelmed because maybe they’re not making enough income to pay it off and they just feel like, yeah, they feel like stuck. They feel like they don’t know how to get out of it. How would you help them?

Ryan Alexander (11:20)
So it’s kind of like when people are stuck in having to lose weight. Many people, get stuck looking at their credit score and they’re like, I can’t figure out it’s not moving. That’s wanting to lose weight and all you do is you look at the scale and say, I can’t figure out why I’m not losing weight. When you want to lose weight, you look at what you’re eating, what you’re drinking, how you’re sleeping, how you’re exercising. With credit, you look at…

Are you paying on time? What’s your usage? What’s my age of history? And how many total open active accounts do I have? You have to learn how the system works. When you think about credit, it controls your approval odds, it controls your interest rates, it controls your insurance rates, and heck, even some dating sites are using credit scores. If you don’t learn how the factors work, you can’t fix or boost your credit score. So you have to take a little time. I don’t care if you buy books. I don’t care if you watch videos. You have to be careful where you get your information from, but you need to invest.

and how the five factors actually work. And then you look at your finances and say, OK, how can I manage these accounts and how can I manage these factors that make up my profile so that I can build a better, thicker credit profile and boost my credit score long term?

Michelle Kesil (12:26)
And how do people hack the system? Like how can people use credit to their advantage?

Ryan Alexander (12:32)
So, I mean, it’s like this. So for example, if I want to buy, let’s just conceptually say a $35,000 car. The difference between good credit and bad credit, talking somebody with a 750 credit score or higher versus somebody with a 500 credit score. Over a five year loan, it will cost you an additional $8,000. Ballpark. I’ve done the math, I’ve used NerdWallet, I’ve played with some calculators. The same thing with a mortgage. If you go to buy a $350,000 house,

the amount of interest you save simply by building a better credit score and a better profile. And I can do it for many people in three to six months. If you have bad credit, it may require six to 12 months, but I’ll be able to tell that quickly once I look at a credit profile. But once you build that credit profile, people will throw money at you and they throw it at you at substantially lower interest rates.

Michelle Kesil (13:27)
Okay, cool. Yeah, that’s super interesting.

Ryan Alexander (13:30)
It’s fun.

And then once you start to do that and you start to build a portfolio of the right credit cards, right? Like because it’s unfortunate and I get a lot of my business because I waive the shiny objects, right? Like what do people see when they see this? They think luxury, they think status, they think, wow, I’m rich. It’s just a credit card. Like at the end of the day, I have people that get these things one time and they can’t afford them the next month. It’s better to start with lower tier cards like

the Chase Sapphire Preferred Card, the Built Rewards Card, or a Capital One Venture. Like have you ever seen this card here, this Built Card? Cool. So for many people, especially in real estate, the Built Rewards Credit Card allows you the opportunity to pay your rent or your mortgage with no processing fee. And you earn points like you would on a Capital One Venture or Chase Sapphire Card.

The card gives you a routing and an account number. So I like to teach people little hacks like this. For example, I pay $3,000 a month on my mortgage. That’s 36,000 points every single year that I earn. I can transfer them to British Airways if I want to go fly to England. I can transfer them to World of Hyatt if I want to have four or five free stays. You can take the everyday expense of your rent or your mortgage and convert that into worldly experiences. That’s the coolest part about it.

Michelle Kesil (14:52)
Yeah, that’s exciting stuff. Do you have any other hacks for realtors or investors? Because that was like the main audience here.

Ryan Alexander (15:43)
Sure, so the biggest hack that I have for realtors is this. Number one, you need to establish credit well before you want or need the credit. So many people, they try to go after credit when they need it. And the problem is, let’s say here’s that opportunity. If that opportunity comes and now you don’t have credit and you gotta build it, you miss that opportunity. But if I start building credit here,

and that opportunity comes, I’m already built and established. So by building credit before you need it, when you actually need it or go to use it, your score is that much higher. So many people that go to invest in real estate and their credit score is at 610, 630, interest rates are a lot lower, I mean a lot higher because your credit score is a lot lower, and that makes borrowing a lot more complicated. Less loan options, it’s more favorable when you have a higher credit score, you get better interest rates, again the insurance rates, all these things, instead of buying

one house, you might be able to buy three houses. It’s just all a matter of understanding how the credit scores influence all finances and all aspects of finances.

Michelle Kesil (16:47)
Yeah, absolutely. And I know you mentioned you created like a teaching platform. Can you share more about what it is that you teach people?

Ryan Alexander (16:57)
Sure, so have you ever heard somebody say, can get you 12 months of 0 % financing on this, that, and the other thing? Have you ever heard that, Okay, so I have too. Here’s the problem. You gotta have over a 700 credit score. So if you don’t have that and you don’t know how to build a 700 credit score, what do you do? Most people don’t know that. Like, just pay my bills on time. Like, I had a guy yesterday. Guy makes close to a million dollars. But he’s stuck in the 620s, 630s. Why? Because he doesn’t understand how the credit algorithm works.

in about three to four months, I guarantee I’m going to have him in the 700s because I know he makes enough money and I can restructure his profile. So by teaching him how the fastest way to build a 700 credit score, I can help him boost his profile. That’s why I built what’s called the 700 credit class. I teach people the five factors on how they work and the differences between a mortgage FICO 2 score and a credit card FICO 8 score or a vantage score 3.0, which is credit karma, credit sesame or nerd wild, things like that.

I teach people through my 700 credit class all the ABCs and 123s of how the credit system works and what they need to do to boost their score.

Michelle Kesil (18:06)
Amazing. And how did you get into this? How did you learn all of this?

Ryan Alexander (18:10)
I was dead broke.

11 years ago I was laying, I was sleeping on an office floor. I lived in an office, the office I worked in selling insurance on an air mattress. And I was dead broke, crashed and burned third time in my life. And it was just because of taking big gambles in life. Like I took a gamble on commercial real estate two years before 9-11 happened. We unfortunately know what happened there and everything came to a screeching halt. In 2008, I made another gamble with mortgage industry, lost everything I had on that too. Then I had another gamble with

technology that I hired a company to build, I lost everything I had again there. So it was in losing all three times and realizing like man like this bad credit it was like impossible to get ahead.

And then said, well, let me figure out this credit thing. So what did I do? I made a financial investment. I invested in a credit course. It cost me 500 bucks. And now eight years later, I’m traveling the country with a six figure company, teaching people from high schools to business owners. I’m teaching people around the country how the credit system works and how to live better simply. I don’t care if you make $30,000 a year or three million a year. I can teach you how to build a better credit profile.

Michelle Kesil (19:22)
Amazing. I love that story from like that being your struggle to that being like, yeah. Yeah.

Ryan Alexander (19:27)
It was the rags the riches story it really was like my friends now who all

make who made a lot more money than me All except for one I make more money than them and they all come to me for credit advice

Michelle Kesil (19:39)
Can you share a little bit more of like how you went from like the bottom to now? Like what were some of the things that you had to do?

Ryan Alexander (19:49)
Sure, so the first thing I got rid of was the 9 to 5 mentality. I got rid of the 9 to 5 employee mentality because that mentality it’s like I’m not working more than 40 hours a week. Okay? Ask a business owner how many hours they worked before they became your boss.

How many hours did they have to work? Go ask real estate investors. How many hours did they work in educating themselves on, how does real estate work? How does financing work? What are the ins and the outs of contracts? How do I negotiate? How many hours did they spend outside of working nine to five?

before they became savvy enough or smart enough or had enough experience to invest in real estate. When you realize that nine to five mentality is what holds most people back, like we just got back from a trip, I just was last year 10 days in ⁓ Barcelona and then just last two weeks ago we were in England. So when you realize that the nine to five mentality keeps most people broke,

you start saying okay. And then you start looking and saying how many men know more about their fantasy football stats and all the players are in fantasy football leagues but they don’t know squat about their FICO scores. It’s an interesting question. And like, it’s not that important. They’ll go and lean on their girlfriends or on their wives’ coattails.

because their fantasy football means more to them than their FICO scores. And so what I try to teach, it’s funny, you’re like holding back, I can see. It’s funny because that’s just the mindset and mentality of America. It’s like, ⁓ it’s somebody else’s job, it’s somebody else’s responsibility, it’s somebody else’s fault. No, it’s not. Wherever you are today, I don’t care what happened, it’s your fault. And even if it’s not 100 % your fault, it’s still your problem. And when you develop that mindset,

Michelle Kesil (21:32)
Yeah, it’s your responsibility

to resolve it.

Ryan Alexander (21:35)
That’s it. You gotta have the resolve and you gotta have the accountability. And so with people that I do one-on-one coaching with…

my credit course or credit program. I’ve made it affordable for the masses. It’s cheap, it’s affordable, it’s very, very simple, but it just teaches you the ABC’s one, two, threes. When I do one-on-one coaching, it’s all documented and recorded. So at the end of 90 days or six months, guess who can’t lie? Me, because it’s recorded with my name, my face, and my company on it. But three to six months later, and I told Michelle to do this, this, and this, and Michelle didn’t listen, guess who can’t hide? And you can’t blame me.

because it’s recorded documentation with exactly what you need to do and it is an absolute process. If you understand the algorithms and you know, I just have to get my payment history to here, I have to keep my utilization to here, I need my agent history to be older than this, and I need to have a nice diverse mix of credit accounts. Can you get an 800 credit score with one credit card? Sure you can. It will take you a long time.

I teach people how that system works to make it happen faster and to make the profile more stable. Because if that one credit card gets closed or something happens, you’re screwed.

Michelle Kesil (22:51)
what happens if it gets closed.

Ryan Alexander (22:53)
So if that

one card gets closed, you lose that age of credit history. So you’ve lost 30 % of what makes up your FICO score. And now you don’t have any credit cards. Sometimes it makes it a lot harder for you to get another credit card. Or you can only get what I would call crap credit cards, not the good credit cards that offer the best perks, rewards, and cash back.

Michelle Kesil (23:15)
Okay, amazing. That is super fascinating and such important stuff. So before we wrap up here, if someone wants to connect with you, reach out, or just learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Ryan Alexander (23:35)
So the best way for people to reach me, would just… ⁓

Most of my content is on tik-tok. It’s just for whatever reason tik-tok I took off You can go to itechcredit.com or you could just send me an email info at itechcredit.com info at itechcredit.com ⁓ You know, you could just send me a message reference this podcast. I’d be more than happy to help It’s it’s just so important and again, I don’t even care if you don’t learn from me Just spend a little bit of time Understand how the credit system works and learn how the credit system can influence all aspects of your finances

I promise you again, I don’t care if you make $30,000 a year or $3 million. Having better credit will help you live and lead to a richer life.

Michelle Kesil (24:18)
Perfect. Well, listen, I really appreciate your time, story, and perspective. We need more people who are teaching and educating in this new way. So thank you for being here.

Ryan Alexander (24:30)
I appreciate it, Michelle. Thanks for having me on here. It was awesome.

Michelle Kesil (24:33)
Yeah, and for those of you tuning in, if you got value from this, make sure you’re subscribed. We’ve got more conversations coming with operators just like Ryan who are out here building real businesses. And we’ll see you all in the next episode.