Pinch: Improve your credit score with your rent payments

Credit bureaus use your apartment rental payments today to calculate your credit score, but only if your rental payments are on your credit report. Pinch is the only mobile app that lets you, a tenant, report your rent payments to all 3 major credit bureaus and improve your credit score. Best of all, Pinch is completely free to use.

This is super smart, @miradu and @maiab. I'm curious which type of consumers signup for Pinch. I assume it's people who don't have great credit as they would have the highest motivation to improve it. 🤔

@miradu @maiab @rrhoover Also people with no credit history, like recent immigrants and younger folks who can’t get or don’t want loans (which you need to build credit)

@maiab @rrhoover @iamjakestream it's really been everyone - services like credit karma and credit sesame have become mainstream so awareness of credit scores are at all time highs, but these services do little to help you move the number outside of offering you another credit card. Pinch will make a disproportionate impact on your score if you have little to no credit history (recent immigrants, youth, recent divorcees), but even if your score is ok, it will still make an impact by providing information that's different from a credit card - plus it feels good to finally get something for paying your rent :)

Hi everyone 👋 I’m Michael Ducker, co-founder of Pinch Rent. I built Pinch with Maia because we saw a changing lifestyle amongst our friends and more broadly, the American public: out of necessity and desire, they were renting their housing, transit, and stuff more often then they were using credit (or seeking loans) to purchase these items. We heard that when eventually they went make a big purchase with credit, they were stunned to find out that without a history of borrowing money, they didn’t have great credit scores. Credit bureaus and credit scoring companies are realizing that those who can pay rent on time month after month are likely to also handle credit responsibly. They’ve integrated rent payments from large landlords into their scoring algorithms - and found that with rental payments, 100% of tenants who were previously un-scorable gained a credit score. And almost 3/4 of those who participate experience a credit score increase. We realized every renter should be able to have their rent reported to the major bureaus and get this credit boost, not just people renting from large corporate landlords, so we built Pinch to offer this service for all tenants, for free. (We’ll make our money helping landlords assess the risk of new tenants and offer reporting as a perk for their existing tenants!). Try us out today — we’re on both iOS and Android — and please let me know your feedback!

@miradu This is fantastic! As someone who's trying to get out of debt, this is so refreshing. Why should those who manage their money well and are not in debt be "punished" when making purchases? It just means you're good at borrowing money. Would love to see a shift to favor those that pay their normal bills on time :) Kudos!

@miradu so basically you copied creditladder

@miradu This is a really cool idea! Would you be open to working with a nonprofit who helps low-to-moderate income Americans kickstart a savings habit? LMK if you'd be interested in chatting more about working together!

@earn YES! We love @earn! Send us note please: founders@pinchrent.com

Drives me nuts that paying your rent on time for years doesn't factor into your credit score. Makes no sense. Good on you for taking this on. There was another service that did this for a while and flopped a couple years ago. Can't remember the name. Hopefully you guys figure out how to make it work

@evankimbrell Thanks Evan! We're lucky to not have invented rental reporting - it's taken 10 years since the invention for it to become integrated into the major credit scores and all 3 bureaus, I don't know if we could have lasted that long waiting for it to be impactful :) But today it makes a big difference, and so we're the first company making a free offering all three bureaus, and we're the only company doing it from your phone.

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