The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) wants to empower local communities to help people who have no credit history, insufficient history or no recent history become credit visible.
CFPB recently completed a study to learn how many people have limited access to credit at the local level. The bureau created individual credit profiles for some states, like West Virginia, and several cities like Lansing, Mich., (below) and Los Angeles, finding that between 16 and 25 percent of adults had limited access to credit due to a limited credit history.
A person is considered ‘credit invisible’ if they do not have credit history with any of the three nationwide credit-reporting companies,” according to CFPB’s recent blog post.
The post offered the following steps to helping people become credit visible:
#1 Help consumers find out their credit status
Consumers can request a free credit score report. All consumers may request the information in their credit reports from each of the three nationwide credit reporting companies once every 12 months at Annualcreditreport.com.
#2 Help consumers build credit history
There are products available that can help people become credit visible, including secured credit cards, credit-builder loans and retail store credit cards. CFPB’s checklist on building credit from scratch has more information.
#3 Help consumers understand what affects credit scores
Make sure consumers know that unpaid utility and telephone bills may be reported to credit bureaus as being in collection.
Cfpb Credit-profiles Handout Lansing by Ed Praetorian on Scribd
