Larry Chiang, founder of Duck9.com, which helps people boost their credit scores, responded to my criticism of his company last week. Basically, I said that paying a company almost $10 a month to remind you to pay your bills is a waste of money. He says it can be worth it. In an E-mail, he told me the following:
Statistically speaking, getting into the 95th percentile (a credit score over 750) is, by nature, hard. A Duck9 registered user graduates to a FICO score over 40 percent higher than an [average] adult living in the United States. Paying $9.95 is ok but we [also] dole out 50,000 free for life subscriptions per month.... Duck9's reminder service is super simple but we add value with predictive reminders based on [the patterns of] students' lives....
[Duck9 is] a secret society of students who realize that over half of America's charge-offs [which have a big negative impact on credit scores] are for under $200 and usually from a department store that they don't know they owe.
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