There are
several things that can be done to improve your credit score. The most
obvious thing that can be done to quickly improve your credit scores is
to keep your payments on time, pay your balances down to below 50% of
your credit limits, do not close credit card accounts if you can avoid
to, and avoid having numerous inquiries on your credit report.
While this may seem very simple and obvious to do there are a
lot of consumers who do not understand credit and credit scoring
because of the lack of information that is available out there.
Therefore, one of the quickest ways to improve your credit score is to
do preventative maintenance and work hard at maintaining an excellent
credit history.
Another quick way to raise your credit score is to
spread your credit card charges evenly through multiple credit cards
that you already have. Having balances greater than 50% of your credit
limit can gave negative impact on your score. Do not overcharge a
single credit card, split up your transactions across cards that you
already own and remit payments to your creditors on time.
One good way to improve your credit report FICO
score is to review your credit report for errors. You can obtain your
credit report for free from annualcreditreport.com or
freecreditreport.com. Dispute and remove any inaccurate information on
your credit report.
If you have a very high balance on one particular
credit card (namely a high balance by comparison to the credit limit),
transferring some of that balance to cards with higher limits, or
simply increasing the limits on the cards with which you have good
payment histories, may yield large increases in very short periods of
time.
You should obtain a copy of your credit report and
check it for errors or old negative accounts that are pulling your
score down. After you identify these accounts you should dispute them
with the credit reporting bureaus through their websites. Normally you
will receive and email or letter letting you know if the accounts were
removed or not.
Keeping credit cards with a zero balance open,
rather than closing them out, will improve your credit score. Credit
scores look at the length of time your open credit has been available
to you. Making small purchases with open, previously zero balance
credit cards is a way to improve your credit score quickly as well.
Keeping your payments on time is a very obvious
way to maintain and improve your credit scores quickly. By keeping your
payments on time, this also includes though making sure that you do not
have or allow any accounts to ever go into a collection account status.
Medical bills are very common for people to let go and while they
normally will not report to your credit report, once they go to a
collection agency there is a good chance that they will find their way
on your credit report at that time.
Medical co-pays, deductibles, and non-payments by the insurance
companies are the most typical medical bills that end up in a
collection account status. It does not matter if it is only a $20
co-pay or a $1,000 deductible that was not paid that ends up as a
collection account on your credit report they will both seriously
affect your credit score. Therefore, in order to quickly improve your
credit score or maintain your high credit scores, make sure these items
are taken care of either at the doctors office, when you receive your
bill or that you set up a payment plan and stick to it.