More than 4 years back I received my first credit card from Wells Fargo. I had never had big spending habits, in fact through engineering school I used to eat whole wheat bread and scrambled eggs almost every day. Very rarely would I eat out or spend any money in entertainment. At the time I was a full time student and my goal was to graduate.
Having a good credit is very important to succeed in the United States as most businesses require investment capital. As I found out for myself, those students who repay school loans as fast as possible will see substantial increase in their credit score. Banking institutions have created programs to reward customers who make good financial decisions. This is why is very important to build responsible spending habits to be able to benefit from credit. One of the biggest advantages to building good credit, is all the consumer protections applied to credit cards… the same which are forfeited when using debit accounts. This will give you peace of mind if you learn to use credit responsibly.
In the video below Graham Stephan talks about credit.
Once I finished engineering school at FIU I had less than $30,000 in debt. I was careful to accumulate as little debt as I could and was lucky to earn various academic grants like Bright Futures Scholar. In hindsight, I’m glad I did not accumulated six figures in debt, living on campus as some of my peers did. When I came out to the workforce my main goal was to repay my loans as fast as I could.
I however, could have made better decisions with the funds I got from grants. Many of the books I needed to buy for Math and Science classes back then would cost $150-$300 or more in the on campus bookstore. Eventually I learned I could get the same books as international editions for a fraction of the price and request a check for whatever funds were leftover. Back then I was not as curious and researched everything voraciously like I do today.
I was very fortunate I landed a job as software engineer testing aircraft applications just a month after graduating. I prepared well to pass comprehensive technical interviews at the time and had spent six months learning to code with the same intensity as when I began learning digital marketing. As I have said my job as software engineer was very challenging. Although I was able to perform all tasks I was assigned, for some of them it came at the cost of mental sanity.
Back then it made me really happy to see the team of engineers behind the project, working very hard to ensure every component of the airplane was tested thoroughly. Every single line of code had to be run in order to ensure the safety of the passengers who would eventually board the airplane. I took it so seriously my team members and I, found the most bugs in the system during performance evaluations. We all worked very hard to achieve this feat.
Unfortunately, this was the first time I realized working so hard for extended periods of time without maintaining physical and mental health eventually leads to burnout. Back then I was spending 10+ hours each day sitting in front of the computer and a couple more driving. The sedentary lifestyle was killing my health. This is why eventually I decided to learn internet marketing which I’m trying to turn into a full time career.
Since I was so proactive about repaying school loans as fast as possible, I managed to pay all my debt well before the six month grace period I was given, elapsed. I was not meant to pay any interest, but I still ended up paying around $300 in interest. The lender started to run interest on the loan as soon as I told them my goal was to pay as little interest as possible. At the time I had less than $7000 left to pay. Had I paid the loan over the 10 year period, I would have lost thousands of dollars worth in interest payments.
Good Credit Is Simple. Pay Your Loans Fast.
The great thing is that in the timespan of 5 months I saw my credit go from low 600’s to over 720. So by pure coincidence I stumbled into a good formula to build credit real fast. Just pay your loans as fast as possible! Today my credit is between 750-800 depending on the report I use.
Since I have good credit I can now take advantage of some credit cards which have some great benefits. The one I recommend for students is Discover.it which will double all the cash back you earn at the end of the first year. This one card is very good to build credit with for students.
Having excellent credit has so many advantages in the United States. Car and house loans will charge less interest. The best credit cards even give you 12-18 month periods penalty free if you don’t make any payments. At one point in time I was able to live on credit for a few months while I was learning digital marketing and trying to figure out how ecommerce works. It allowed me to learn enough to find a job which gave me substantial experience in digital marketing, ecommerce and SEO to be able to land more jobs in the future.
As I have learned, the ability to generate substantial income online so as to become financially independent is the ultimate goal. I have found some success. However, more importantly are the skills and the ability to apply them to help others. Ecommerce as we know it today is about building strategic partnerships and cross promoting with different influencers and internet marketers. Is really hard to succeed if we do all the work. Merging skills and cross marketing digital assets is better and produces results faster. Relationship building is key.
Personally I think the biggest advantage of having great credit is that it can be used as starting capital to build real businesses. Sometimes is about knowing about a specific opportunity, investing in it and capitalizing on it while is there. This is why I think building good credit, even if you don’t use it is a great thing to do. If you want to learn more about credit, this forum is one of the best. You can also find a good guide here about credit card churning, which is the practice of opening credit card accounts to take advantage of sign up bonuses.
As I have seen for myself to get a website going often times requires some initial investment to buy a domain and hosting. You could also use free hosting platforms like blogger, but in general it won’t rank the same. Sign up bonuses can greatly help find the funds to get started experimenting with one of many online business models. This is all about experimenting and trying out different ideas and methods to find out what works!
Nowadays, there are countless tutorials online for beginners so they can learn how to launch new websites. Someone I closely follow is Fox from Web School. He is one of the main admins at The Fastlane Forum, and always sharing great information. In one of his latest videos he is showing the complete process of how he gets websites live for his clients. He has a very successful web developer agency.
What you will learn in the video below is not the kind of solution you can offer to an enterprise type business that has to deal with inventory and would need back end programming. However, if all you need to build is a web page to promote or diffuse some information, a phone number and an address. Maybe even a blog. This is a good way to do it once you learn basic HTML.
The biggest advantage of using this method is that static HTML websites are lighting fast and don’t break as much as full blown websites using WordPress and page builders like Elementor, Divi or Beaverbuilder. Page builders add more clutter in the form of API’s needed in order to function. Like I said, winning online is all about experimenting. Many failures will lead you to success. Business has no warranty!
Be responsible. Build a good credit. Even if you don’t have all the knowledge and skills to use it now, it will greatly help you in the future.
–Rey
PS: Back in the day when I was first starting out, I bought a course about digital marketing of very little value. Luckily I bought it with a credit card and Wells Fargo had consumer protection if I could prove a product or service was not as advertised. I was able to recover what I spent because I had great credit and good consumer relation with my bank. Based on this experience I think everyone should learn to build excellent credit.