Expert Bio
Kristy Welsh
Recession has been good for Kristy Welsh's career. With a bachelor's degree in Aeronautical Engineering, the former rocket scientist and satellite designer found herself without a government contract in the early '90s. Taking advantage of her downtime, Welsh went to refinance the loan on her house, and came away with more than a lower interest rate; she was persuaded to try her hand as a loan officer. Welsh quickly became top producer in her office, and during day-to-day operations she received a crash course on credit and loans. Specializing in working with people who were mostly "B," "C," and "D" credit (less-than-perfect to perfectly-awful credit), she learned to fix people's credit not only because, "I'm a nice person and I hate to see nice people get screwed," but for financial motivations as well. "If credit problems stopped a loan from closing, I didn't get paid."
Since you can't totally take the geek out of the girl, Ms. Welsh kept her rocket-scientist mind entertained with the latest trends in computer technology and became fascinated with the Internet. She formed Web Nation, Inc., her own web design company, in 1996. As a marketing test in cyberspace, Welsh started a free credit information site to see how much traffic a site could attract due to quality content. At the time she started Creditinfocenter.com, very little credit information was available to the general public, and given Welsh's background, it seemed an ideal subject. (She also doubted rocket science would be a very big draw.) Creditinfocenter.com was an immediate hit, paying for itself with advertising revenue after the first month. Welsh was, and still is, amazed by how little the public knows about credit and its profound effect on their lives. As the site continues to grow beyond 300 pages, Welsh has published 4 different books based on the website content, the most popular of which is Good Credit is Sexy.
Carrie Coghill Kuntz
Dawn Handschuh
Tom Fragala