How To Quickly Raise Your Credit Score: 7 Surefire Techniques
Lower your balances
Your balance to credit limit ratio is one of the largest factors in your score. Lower your balances and your score will skyrocket. If you don’t have the cash to do this, see tip #5
Increase your credit limits
If you have a 4K balance on a 4K card, that hurts your score. A 4K balance on a 6K limit card however, is much better. Call your card companies ask for as large a credit increase as possible. Also, make sure they do a “soft” pull, not a “hard” inquiry on your credit. That way the credit increases don’t ding your score with an inquiry.
Dispute any inaccurate or invalid entries on your report
I had a credit card that was showing up twice on my report. So it looked like I was using twice as much credit as I really was. You can dispute even old collections by making the creditor validate the account. You can also hire (cheaply for a lawyer) a service to do all this for you.
Re-age your account
Ask your creditor to delete an old late-payment. This only works if you’ve been paying on time recently. Call your creditor and ask if they will “re-age” your account which will delete any late payments on your account.
Refinance your unsecured credit cards into a term-loan
This will lower your credit utilization ratio. At most banks it’s nearly impossible to get a personal loan to refinance credit cards. However a new bread of lenders, in peer-to-peer lending make this option much simpler. A 640 or above can get you approved at Lending Club (plus you’ll get $25 just for registering and verifying your account)
Start using that old account again
Don’t ring up a huge balance, but if you have an old account that you haven’t used in a year, it might not be reporting on your score (you do know your score, right? If not MyFico is the only legit place to get your score).
Check all 3 Scores
To know where you want to be, you need to know where you’re starting. MyFico is the only place I recommend people get their credit score.
I'm 300K in debt. Gulp. I'm 24 and day traded away a fortune. Now I'm trying to crawl back to zero. Why not subscribe to my RSS feed and join me on this journey. You can also subscribe via e-mail. I appreciate tips and feedback! ~ DebtKid
