5 Life-Hacks to Improve Your Credit in 30 Days

There are certain times when it pays to have the highest credit score possible. Maybe you’re about to refinance your mortgage. Or, maybe you’re recovering from a bad credit history and you want to get approved for a credit card.

It’s always good to have a healthy score, of course.

But if you’re in a place at the moment when a higher credit score would help you save money or get back on track with your credit, there are a few under-the-radar ways to speed up the process.

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR CREDIT SCORE

Here you want to make sure your credit report is clean of any kind of questionable negative payment information.  Most credit repair companies just are limited to simple credit challenges but there is much more than can be done to rectify negative information on your report. May they be collections, late payments, liens, judgments, tax liens, each can be addressed in a surgical manner using the appropriate tactics below:

A)  An effective credit bureau dispute letter:  Utilizing this approach,  you can dispute items with each of the 3 credit bureaus. This method is primarily effective for any negative information that may have fallen behind about 4 years ago or longer.

B) Advanced collection settlement techniques:  If you have recent collections on the credit report which are valid collections, these are not likely to come off with credit bureau disputes, hence you want to utilize a pay for delete technique to ensure removal of these accounts.

C) Direct creditor disputes: If there are recent late payments or charge-offs resulting from a final missed payment, you will have to engage the creditor directly in a strategic dispute to get them to remove the negative reporting of the trade-line.

D) Find Out When Your Issuer Reports Payment History: Call your credit card issuer and ask when your balance gets reported to the credit bureaus. That day is often the closing date (or the last day of the billing cycle) on your account. Note that this is different from the “due date” on your statement.

There’s something called a “credit utilization ratio.” This is the amount of credit you’ve used compared to the amount of credit you have available. You have a ratio for your overall credit card use as well as for each credit card.

It’s best to have a ratio — overall and on individual cards — of less than 30%. But here’s an insider tip: To boost your score even quicker, keep your credit utilization ratio under 10%.

E) Pay Down Debt Strategically: The amounts you owe on credit cards make up 30% of your FICO score. FICO rewards you if you can resist the temptation of running up your spending close to the limit. That’s why you’ll get a higher score if you use 25% or less of your available credit on each of your credit cards and in aggregate.

So, start paying down those balances that are closer to maxing out first, before turning to the others to help your score quickly.