I grew up in the middle of nowhere. We had to drive twenty minutes every day to get to an actual town for school, and that town wasn't big enough for a movie theater or bowling alley. It was just big enough for the factories and fast food that made up practically all the available jobs. Sad, right? 

It definitely felt that way. I spent my childhood longing for the things I'd seen in movies: museums, movie theaters, malls, nice restaurants and lots of job opportunities. That's the life I wanted, but I didn't know how to get there. Are you supposed to convince someone to hire you in a bigger place before you live there, somehow? Are you supposed to just move and then hope you'll find a job later that pays well enough to support you? I didn't know how I was going to get to that bigger and better life. I just knew that I had to.

That opportunity finally presented itself in 2021 when the owner of the restaurant I worked at bought another location. The new store was in a town five times the size of the one I'd gone to school in. The owner needed workers to get the new place up to our company standards. Obviously, I jumped at the chance!

I started commuting an hour each way to the new store because my fiance and I didn't have an apartment there yet. I was on the lookout for For Rent signs, scanning the newspaper and the internet, and calling possible landlords. Unfortunately for me, this was just after everyone was getting over the original shock of Covid and landlords were skittish about new tenants. I'd been commuting and apartment hunting for six months before someone finally called me back! My fiance and I filled out the application and put down the deposit with relief.

Then the landlady got back to me with the news. I hadn't passed the credit check.

She said that if my fiance hadn't had better credit than mine at the time, my lack of credit history would have kept me from being able to live there at all. She even said that if he ever had to move out for any reason, I'd have no choice but to leave too, because I wasn't allowed to live there on my own.

Talk about a wake-up call! I was blindsided. My parents had never taught me anything about credit and neither had my school. I didn't even know before then that you can get denied housing because of bad credit, and now it was happening to me!

This shock woke me up to the importance of understanding the system we're all in. From then on, I read financial articles, watched so many YouTube videos and listened to hours of financial education podcasts to find anyone who could explain more about how credit works and how to get a good credit score. It took a lot of time and a lot of work, as well as  sorting through duplicate and sometimes conflicting information.

Making my own education did pay off, though. Within the year, I had increased my Equifax score by 163 points and my TransUnion score by 142 points! And my higher score opened up a lot of ways for me to keep more of my money. The next time I had to open a utility for the apartment, they checked my score and didn't charge me a deposit at all. I started getting credit cards with great cashback rewards because I had a good enough score to get approved for them. And I knew that if I ever needed to get a loan, I'd get the lowest interest offers for that, too. Everything that required a credit check was going to be weighed in my favor from then on.

A good credit score is a game changer. For me, it opened up a lot of opportunities, just like I'd always wanted. But it took a lot of work. I don't want you to have to do the same sorting through confusing and conflicting information that I did, so I'm putting all the important things I've learned into my membership! It's being updated constantly so you can find everything in one place, access knowledge and guidance to support you, and never let a bad credit check deny you the life you want!