Becoming fundable often hinges on a single factor that affects your ability to get a loan. Now, getting funds depends on your secret consumer score. And just what is that? Merrill Chandler delves into consumer scores and how they affect you. He looks at secret consumer scores, how they work, and how you can bring yours up. Tune in and learn how to get fundable with great advice from Merrill.

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Your Secret Consumer Score

In this episode, we are going to expand beyond fundability to little-known trust scores, how they are impacting, how people treat you, how companies treat you, and how you get prioritized based on their evaluations of you. It sounds a lot like FICO. I will see you on the inside.

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I am excited about what I am about to share with you. Some of you may have heard it and some have not. How many of you are Black Mirror fans? It is on Netflix. It is a few years old. Do you remember the episode called Nosedive? Nosedive was a girl who was being selected to go to her friend’s wedding. The subplot was that she was selected because the social scores that everybody was being measured by would advance the soon-to-be bride’s social status by being compassionate to a lower-scoring person. That is the premise of this.

The hijinks of the episode called Nosedive was that this person who was invited to the wedding goes to the airport and there is a problem. She starts getting angry because her self-esteem is super invested in speaking at this wedding. She can’t get on the plane so she starts throwing a fit. Everybody around her is downgrading her social score. All of a sudden, it got low that security came and asked her to leave the airport. She ends up going to a rental car facility. Because of how low her rental score was, they did not trust her with a good car. They gave her a junker. The hijinks continue through the entire episode.

Fact or fiction? What we are talking about in this episode are some little-known, behind the curtain, and what is commonly known as trust scores. Let me tee up what these trust scores are. In the Bootcamp, my FBLs, or even on one of my previous podcasts, I even talked about how our phones are measuring our battery usage and that there is a correlation. There are financial groups out there. Some of the FinTechs are measuring how charged our battery stays because there is a correlation between faithful repayment of a loan given to us and how charged our batteries are. This is crazy. We have talked about it before and this takes it to a whole new level.

My content manager and producer, Sky, is brilliant. She is always looking for cool things for us to be able to talk about and she finds stuff that is pertinent in the world. I do the fundability take on it. Simultaneously, there was an article in The New York Times. The gentleman’s name was Kashmir Hill. He started talking about how he got access to his secret trust scores. Doing a deeper dive, Sky also found Tiffany Ferguson, who is a YouTuber. She goes by Tiffany Ferg and she likes to keep us up on internet movements, trends, and things like that. It is fascinating. Check her out. She has got great content. I love the article that Kashmir did.

How does this affect fundability? The first thing is that trust scores or these secret scores are about how there are FinTech companies who measure how you show up with their customer service reps, their agents, or otherwise. They help define where you are in line and prioritize troublesome clients further back in the phone queues when you are on hold. How many times do you return items to a store? What type of service? Whether or not, you complete the surveys.

Until I read this article, I had never filled out surveys. I am categorized as a non-survey filler outer. I am not giving them feedback to level up their service, so they downgrade me as a customer. I am like, “The hell.” To this point, I thought it was a waste of my time. How long you sit on hold may be determined by these trust scores and how well you show up.

I was reading a book and there was a particular chapter saying, “The power of showing up.” These have a close correlation. With some of us, how do we set up a new habit? “Let me go to the gym. I am going to work out for an hour.” I learned from this and it has changed my entire life. My first goal every morning is to get on my mat. I have a yoga mat down in my workout room. Sometimes I am exhausted. 9 times out of 10, once I am on my mat, I start doing my stretches and my yoga poses and then I will go work out, grab my barbells, and again on the bike or whatever it is that is up for that day. I have to get to the mat first.

Sometimes, I do not feel like working out. Total transparency, there have been times when I have climbed on my mat and fallen back to sleep. I got there and that is 1 out of 10 times. This is what I am encouraging all of us to do because these trust scores are about how we show up with other vendors. Airbnb is a big one here. Sift.com has a file on you. You can go order these. We are even adding it to our Get Fundable ID Protection eBook. The whole idea of this is that how we show up can now be measured. Some of us maybe even more motivated to show up well.

What does this have to do with fundable? First of all, until we found each other and you learned, you might not have known about the 28 FICO scores, the lender scores, or what I call the secret scores that lenders use that most of us didn’t know about. Those secret scores are game-changers. We now can go do a mortgage knowing exactly what a lender is going to see, get an auto loan, or see what our bank cards are even before we apply for a credit card or a business line of credit.

We have the intel before we do any of this because we are now behind the curtain. We are now seeing how we take the red pill, we wake up from the Matrix, and we are like, “It is a completely different world.” We have the same power now to begin to see what is being measured in all aspects of our lives. It is another function of borrower behaviors. Many times, I preach the gospel of borrower behaviors. These borrower behaviors change our fundability when we align ourselves with fundability principles.

Secret Consumer Score: Secret scores are game-changers. We can now do a mortgage knowing exactly what the lender will see or check our bank cards even before we apply for a credit card or a business line of credit.

Did you realize that the terms and conditions of the different websites you use give people and these companies access to your data so that they can measure service better and/or know if we are good people? How do we treat their customer service staff? How do we show up? There are a number of different companies that are collecting this data. Of course, they go out and work with other companies and sell their services. It is a transparent life. We rarely read those terms and conditions, yet we give it all away.

One of the things that these guys do is identify stolen credit cards, help spot identity thieves and abusive behavior. I love how they put abusive behavior with stolen credit cards, stolen identities, and identity thieves. It is bad behavior. There are emails that you can request. There is a great article. Watch Tiffany’s YouTube videos. It was awesome to learn what they were doing. As I always do, I am going to go get my files and add this to our Get Fundable ID Protection.

We have talked over and over about the importance of our identities. Our identity is our data identity. It is our online identity and online data. All of these things we have power over if A) We know and B) We do something about it, so this expands. This is one more circle on our target. Bullseye borrowing is that middle bullseye point in being fundable. There is more and more that we can do to align ourselves to becoming awesome borrowers and not just having great internal performance data.

Check out the article and Tiffany. This is Merrill Chandler. I love discovering this for myself and sharing it with you. More importantly, go to GetFundableIDProtection.com. You can download our assessment. It is an awesome checklist about how to create privacy and what is being measured out there, your medical records, and MIB files. All of that is in there. Go check it out. I will see you on the inside. Like, love, and share. If this is important for somebody in your life, make sure they know. See you next time.

Important Links

• Kashmir Hill – I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score. Now You Can Get Yours, Too.
• Tiffany Ferg – YouTube
• Sift.com
• Get Fundable ID Protection