How To: Improve Your Credit Score

Here here some excerpts from a handy article from Man vs. Debt with a few tips for improving your credit score.

Reader Question: Quick Ways To Raise Credit
by Baker on March 29, 2009

There are no extremely quick ways to raise your credit!
Even some of the “quick” methods that can raise your credit, usually take 30-90 days to actually appear. And of course, the best way to build up a great credit score is gradually, over time. That being all fine and dandy, we did discuss a view strategies over a quick phone call.

Pull your credit report and check for inaccuracies!
My friend had paid to pull his credit score (which he could have got as part of a free trial at MyFico.com), but had not pulled his actual credit reports. I told him the first step and one of the quickest ways to see a turn-around in your actual score is to make sure that the information in your credit report is actually YOUR information. He was surprised to hear that my wife was the victim of identity theft several years ago and that it is the fastest growing white collar crime in the world!

Fix inaccuracies and resolve any legitimate unknowns!
I wont be diving into the exact process for reporting fraud and fixing inaccuracies (that would be a post in its own), but I do want to point out that this is the quickest way to see a major difference in your scores. If you take 3-4 fraudulent, unpaid accounts off your record, you can imagine what that might do to your score.

Also, don’t be afraid to call creditors, especially those who might hold legitimate accounts that you did not honestly know of. A couple strategies that wouldn’t help my friend, but could help you!

My friend doesn’t have any open credit cards. He has no balances and canceled his credit cards a while ago. Although I strongly believe this is a great strategy to commit to being debt-free (see Declaring War: Canceling Credit Cards), I did tell him that his mix of credit ratio (10% of overall score) was down a little because of this. Opening a new credit card wouldn’t immediately help as the new credit would temporarily ding his credit. It also wouldn’t improve his account length until much later and would only marginally improve his mix of credit.

If you DO currently have credit card debt:
Try calling all of your credit cards and asking them to raise your credit limits. See if they can raise your limits without re-inquiring on your credit score, therefore avoiding any temporary ding from an inquiry. This will lower your overall debt utilization ratio, meaning you will be using a lower percent of your total available debt, thus raising your score. Be sure to site payment history, length you’ve been a customer, etc… If all else fails, threaten to cancel the card and ask for their retention department. Credit card companies will often do just about anything to keep a customer they are making money on!

Rearranging revolving debts. Your overall utilization rate is important (see above), however so does the amount of debt on each specific card. For example someone may have a $1,000 balance with $5,000 in limits over 3 cards. In this example, let’s say one card is maxed out ($1000 of $1000 limit) and the other two have balances of $0 with $2,000 limits. This arrangement of debt is actually hurting the individual. They would be better off having $200 on this first card and $400 a piece on the remaining two. Their individual cards go from being 100%/0%/0% to being 20%/20%/20% in percent of used debt. This actually improves the credit score. Bottom line, having individual cards close to being maxed-out hurts your credit score!