Always seeking to improve the member experience, Eastern Utah Community Credit Union has taken another step forward, becoming an official FICO affiliate. To discuss this new development, Ted Thayne from EUCCU joined the KOAL newsroom to shed light on what it means for members.

Opening our conversation, Thayne explained the concept of FICO,” It’s basically how well you’re going to pay back your loans, money that you borrow, things of that nature. It’ll play into your FICO score. So credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, all that fun stuff all play into your FICO score.”

He continued,” Revolving is one of the biggest things that they’ll look at. So your credit cards, they’ll want to look at how much of a limit you have compared to how much of a balance you have. They like to see a low balance with a high limit … Balancing that and making your payments on time is one of the quickest ways to boost your FICO score. They like to see that you borrow money and then you pay it back responsibly and not have too much of it on there at the same time, so it’s kind of a fun little game that they play, but it’s pretty easy with the right coaching.”

Wrapping the conversation back to EUCCU, Thayne shared,” We’re going to become an affiliate with them. You’ll be able to go to our website, and when you log in, you’ll see a little section showing your FICO score. Once you see that, if it’s not where you want it to be, you can come in. You can talk to any one of our loan officers. We’ll kind of give you some tips and tricks as we talked about on how to build those things that are holding it down, I mean, overall, the goal is the higher credit score, the lower interest you pay. The lower interest you pay, the more money you can save over the life of a loan.”

Thayne added,” Everybody wants to save a little bit of money, right?”

“We want you to feel comfortable with the person you’re working with,” expressed Thayne of the environment at EUCCU. “We want you to build that relationship with them. So if it’s someone, you know, we’ve got quite a few down there, and if it’s someone that you’re like, ‘Hey, I’ve talked to them before, I want to talk to them again.’ You can call them directly. You can call a branch and ask for them. You can walk in; you don’t need an appointment. You can walk in and just visit with them.”

Closing our conversation, Thayne stated,” Like I said, just come in and talk to us. We want to have your best interest at heart, so we want to give you the advice that we can and kind of lead you in the right direction to save you some money in the long run. Maybe set you up to get into your first house, do the things that you want to accomplish in life and save you some money while you’re doing it all based on three little numbers that show up on a credit report.”

For more information about the credit union and its services, visit the business on Facebook or at EUCCU.com.