7 Ways To Increase Your Credit Score

7 Ways to Increase Your Credit Score

In today’s world a good credit score is like gold. Good credit is necessary to buy a house or a car, but your credit is often checked when you apply for a job. A higher credit score will also give you more options when you do need credit, and also at a better interest rate.  Here are some tips to raise your credit score.

Easy Credit Repair Tips :

1. You can get free credit reports annually from all 3 credit bureaus. Use www.annualcreditreport.com .  This is free! The best way to use this service is to ask for one credit report every 4 months. This way you will get a free one every year, but you can do some overall monitoring about 3 times per year.   If you see any errors, make the effort to get them fixed, and this will help out your credit score. If you want to see your actual score, you can sign up for a free account with www.creditkarma.com .  This is the best way to see your actual score, since standard credit reports only show your history, not the actual number of your score.
2. Even if you pay off a card every month, make sure to not max it out. Try not to use more than 20% or your credit limit in any month. If you have a need to use a lot of your credit, then try to make more than 1 payment in that billing month. This will help your balance come down when it is time for your lender to send a report to the credit bureau(s).
3. If you are responsible and careful, go ahead and ask for a higher limit. This will help lower your credit used ratio, helping to keep to that 20% or lower amount mentioned above.
4. Pay on Time. We all know this is important, but did you know that your FICO credit score uses this data to make up around 35% of your number?
5. If you have good credit, but maybe 1 or 2 blemishes, you can often ask the lender to remove these from your credit report. This only works when you have an overall history of good credit with the company, but maybe had a bumpy period. It does not hurt to ask, and you would be surprised at how often the company will comply.
6. Don’t open or apply for a lot of credit at once. Credit inquiries do put a small ding in your score. The only exception to this is for major loans, such as a mortgage or car. If you are applying for one of these big purchases, make sure to have all the applications done in a short period of time. The credit bureaus will not ding you for these, since they know most consumers will apply for several loans before making a decision.
7. Don’t close out old accounts with good history. 15% of your score comes from length of credit history. Go ahead and leave those on your report to show your creditworthiness and boost your number.

Whether you need a little boost in your FICO credit score, or a lot; these tips can help you get started. Use one of our tips to increase your credit score or all of them. Soon you should  see the difference a little planning and effort to implement these credit repair tips can make on your score.