How to increase your Credit Score in 30 days

Before we begin, let’s start with the basics.  Order your credit report AND your scores! Of course you can’t fix something unless you know what is going on. You can always obtain your free credit report from annualcreditreport.com BUT it will not include your FICO score.  Do not rely on third party companies who use the Vantage System, like Credit Karama or Credit Sesame, you want to pull your FICO score from ALL 3 bureaus. Most companies will provide you your FICO score monthly for $15-30 a month.  We use Credit Hero Score – it includes monitoring and alerts so we can catch errors and issues instantly.

  1. Credit Line Increases
    1. If you have been paying on time AND your current score is over 600, you can call your credit card company and ask for a credit line increase. Most times they will not do a hard pull on your credit. A credit line increase will instantly decrease your credit utilization which accounts for a large portion of your credit score.
    2. Honorary mention for adding tradelines – a tradeline is any credit line that shows up on your credit report. If you have a family member who has an account that is in good standing and has low utilization, having them add you as an authorized user is one way to increase your credit score. These arrangements should only be done with family member you trust. There is an entire industry of companies that buy and sell tradelines, however you absolutely need to proceed with caution. While buying a tradeline is legal, it is very risky.
  2. Late Payment Removals
    1. If you have late payments on your credit report within the last 2 years we want to do our best to get them removed. First determine the age of the account – if this is your oldest account and the majority of the time you have been on time, you want to dispute the late payment reporting NOT the entire account.  Having an account removed that is mainly positive will hurt your score
    2. If it is only 1 missed payment, call the creditor and ask for them to remove the late report. Let them know that you are committed to continuing to pay your bills on time and that since the late payment you have put a safety net in place so that it doesn’t happen again. This works best if you have consistently been on time and only have 1 missed payment.
    3. If the entire account needs to be removed, check your credit report for errors in your name, address, current amount owed, date opened, etc. Send a dispute letter to the credit bureaus asking them to remove this account because it is inaccurate.
  3. Pay Down your Debt
    1. Once you’ve obtained your credit report, and attempted to increase your available credit, calculate how much you need to get your credit utilization down to 30%. If you have it, DO IT. Don’t wait – get yourself out from under the weight of credit card debt and pay off those balances.

 

As always if you are in need of credit repair we are here to help.Fix my Credit