There's gift I've ever received has to be a bike when I was younger, a pedal bike.

It was a sort of slick little road bike and I remember it was all like it was so it was all wrapped up

but it was so obvious what it was obviously because nothing shaped like a bike and I had a little ribbon on it and I was so

I guess. For that was a life changer and I'm still sort of big on cycling around my area now so for that one change me a little.

Joy in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Clark Howard Show. Our mission is to serve you and empower you so you make better financial decisions in your life.

I've got some big news on the credit front. Believe it or not one of the credit bureaus now will let you create

your own credit file. I'm going to explain how that works and later you can a little bit more meat on the bones to my advice on travel and cruises.

Got a new warning for you about booking.

So, experience has been experimenting for years and how they're going to deal with the new competitors that are coming up with new ways of evaluating people's

credit standing that work quite differently from traditional credit scoring models that are from the Troika of Equifax Trans Union and

experience. They've pretty much been doing the same thing for a couple of generations now. So now there's a lot of deep data.

A lot of people out there coming up with new ways to more accurately determine risk levels from people, particularly those who have what are known as thinner

and those. No credit file or virtually nothing on it. So if I'm a bank, a credit union, a lender of any kind, it's really hard for me to figure out the risk level that somebody represents who is younger, maybe they're an

immigrant to the United States, whatever it is, somebody who never used credit and now they think they want to buy a home or a car and they need a loan.

So there's all this experimentation coming on. I've talked about pedal card in the past that uses an entirely different method to determine your risk level.

There are a number of fentex that are using new methods to try to determine. So experience came up with something called boost a few years ago that started as an experiment and now is a regular product for them not recognized by most lenders.

But it allows you to have things reported as part of your credit and potentially there's a version of a credit score that takes into account how you pay your power bill, how you pay your cell phone bill, how you pay your rent, different things that normally are not incorporated at all in a credit report or a score.

Well, now experience is going to step further in something that I first mentioned when they were testing it and now they're launching it and it's a program where you if you are a no file person meaning you have no credit reported all which there are tens of millions of Americans that are non existent in the credit reporting system.

You can set up your own wild and then what they report on are these nine credit things in your life.

They reported to the Wall Street Journal that the average equivalent credit score of people from the test and how they paid their regular bills was 665, which is actually a pretty decent score for a credit rookie.

And it's enough potentially for someone to get a traditional low limit credit card and to get a not horrible car loan.

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