Hampton Credit Pioneers the First Credit Wealth Service in the US

In April, Hampton Credit re-launched itself, graduating from a credit repair company to a provider of a new, groundbreaking Credit Wealth service.

As credit becomes an increasingly important aspect of everyone's life, Hampton Credit has developed the first service to provide customers with a complete credit restoration and credit management plan that can take someone with poor credit and make them a millionaire by retirement. This month we sit down with the CEO of Hampton Credit, Brian Barnes, to find out what Credit Wealth is and how this innovative service works.

Thank you for joining me today, let’s right down to it, what exactly is “Credit Wealth?”
No problem, happy to be here.  Okay, take a person who has fair credit with a 620 credit score.  That person, on average, will end up spending more than $200,000 in additional interest charges than someone with a 720 score.  Now, if that money were put in a retirement fund instead of wasted on interest, it would grow to over $1.5 million by retirement.  That is the value of your credit score, or your “Credit Wealth.”

So you are saying that by improving your credit, you can essentially become a millionaire by retirement, without doing anything else?
Exactly.  A person who already has poor credit is typically accustomed to paying additional interest on auto loans, credit cards, home loans, etc.  We can easily show them how to improve their credit and save thousands every year with lower interest payments; however, our goal is to transform someone with poor credit into a millionaire by retirement.

That’s a pretty big objective, how does the new Credit Wealth service accomplish that?
We have spent the past six months pioneering a simple plan that applies the principles of credit restoration and credit management to an individual’s specific situation, and then turns those principles into an easy to follow, step-by-step plan for the customer to implement.  

On the credit restoration side, we target the negative elements of their current credit report.  We identify those elements, and then give the customer a detailed strategy for removing those items, whether by bureau disputes, debt validation, goodwill, etc.  We will even draft their initial dispute letters to help them get started.

For credit management, we target all of the factors that the credit bureaus use to calculate their credit score.  We again apply those factors to their situation and we create a plan to easily prevent future late payments, lower credit balances, age their accounts, and create the correct mix of accounts.

Finally, we show them how to lower their rates on loans after their credit improves and how to put their savings to work.  Ultimately, it is an A-Z strategy to take anyone with poor credit and restore their Credit Wealth.

What happens when you deliver this customized plan to the customer?  Won’t they need help on implementing it?
While everything is explained in great detail, we expect that people will have questions.  After they get the initial plan, they have a couple weeks to look it over and implement all of the initial steps.  During that time they have unlimited access to our customer service for any questions they may have. We will even walk them through any parts they are having trouble with.

For those customers who would like additional assistance dealing with the credit restoration plan, we have a month-to-month service set up where they can get unlimited customer service for help in answering questions, giving advice, and even reviewing their dispute correspondence before they send it out.

Sounds impressive, is anyone else taking this approach to improve someone’s credit?
Our research does not indicate anyone else is providing such a detailed, comprehensive service.  Many companies are looking for a customer they can make money on for a long period of time by creating a dependency relationship with their customer.  Our philosophy is to empower the customer and give them independent control over their credit for life.

Why did you decide to move Hampton Credit’s services in this direction?
I felt that simply performing credit repair for our customers was a lot like going to the gym for them.  They could relax while we improved their credit, but what happens when the service stops?  They haven’t learned how to keep the process going or even maintain their credit once it is healthy again.  More than likely, without a core change in the way they managed their credit, they would backslide into a status of poor credit again.  We don’t want to be in the business of repeat customers.

There is a lot of negative press regarding the credit repair industry; did this play a role in your decision to develop this new Credit Wealth service?
The problem with the credit repair industry is that there are a lot of bad apples making it tough for the few good ones.  Even if you are performing legitimate, ethical credit repair like we were, the initial assumption is that you are one of the bad apples.  Part of this problem extends from the fact that credit repair is really not that hard, it’s just that most people don’t take the time to learn how it works.  So this results in a “mysterious” service that almost anyone in the lending business can learn how to perform in a month or two. 

With the low barriers to entry and customer ignorance regarding the service being performed, businesses were able to charge extraordinary fees of up to $2,500 per customer.  This lead to a flood of unethical credit repair companies who are unfortunately still making a brisk business today.

Instead of performing credit repair, we want to provide a more responsible service and teach our customers how to do it themselves.  This will have the dual effect of halting their reliance on credit repair services and giving them the ability to manage their credit for the rest of their lives.

With the tightening of mortgage lending guidelines, aren’t you going to see more customers looking for a quick fix instead of a long-term plan?
Yes, we are already seeing that.  There has been a steady increase in customers looking to improve their credit so that they can refinance their homes in a month or two.  Our Credit Wealth service also includes a number of “quick fix” strategies that can be used to give you that boost you need to qualify for a loan.

We include many of the same tactics that legitimate credit repair companies use, the difference is that we explain exactly how they work and any downsides that can occur as a result of some of these quick-fix actions.  We want our customers making informed decisions about their credit.

This is a major new direction for Hampton Credit, do you have anything else on the drawing board we should know about?
 (Laughing)  Yes, we have some exciting plans in the works, but you are going to have to wait to hear about them along with everyone else.

Never hurts to ask.  Thank you for your time today, let’s do this again soon.
I hope so, thanks.