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"Your Credit"

Articles:

How is your credit calculated?

The Fair Credit Reporting Act

What is a good credit score?

How to fix common credit report problems.

How to raise your credit score.

Where to get your credit report online.

How To Raise Your Credit Score

     Whether you have poor credit due to late or missed credit card payments, a repossession or foreclosure or because you have filed bankruptcy, you may be wondering how to raise your credit score. If this is you, check out the following tips to get you started:

- Always make sure that you pay your bills on time every month. Your credit score will begin to improve after three consistent months of timely payments post to your account. As the lenders begin to report this information to the three major credit bureaus, you will see your credit score start to improve.

- If possible, avoid using more than 50% of your available credit on any one credit card.

- When/if you notice inaccurate information on your credit file, dispute it with the credit bureau immediately. In addition, you may also contact the creditor who is reporting incorrect information directly and ask that they update their information with each of the three credit bureaus.

- If you have poor credit, including a recent bankruptcy, you can raise your credit score by applying for a secured credit card or similar issuer that is known to cater to those with past credit problems. You will be likely to pay higher interest, but you will see that your credit score will begin to rise as you establish new accounts and pay them on time each month.

- If your credit reports are showing old accounts as being open when they are actually closed, call the creditor and send a letter of dispute with the credit bureau. If an account is very old, the creditor may not even have the account on file any longer and may not be able to assist you. But, the credit bureau will begin an investigation and will confirm that the account is closed and your credit report will be updated. This is important due to the fact that numerous opened and unused accounts are of concern to some lenders who may be wondering if you plan to use all of this available credit later. The bottom line is that you need to make sure all of your closed accounts are being reported as such.

- Numerous credit inquiries, such as those that occur when you apply for credit, can lower your credit score. Therefore, the best way to raise your credit score is to avoid applying for credit in excessive or frequent patterns.

- If any/all of your credit cards have extremely high credit limits and you do not have any plans on using the entire amount, call the creditor(s) and ask that they lower your available credit. This will raise your credit score for several reasons, including a lesser amount of available credit for lenders to worry about and it will curb the temptation for you to later max out the card on a luxury purchase.

- And finally, the single most important aspect of raising your credit score involves you actually checking your credit report every six months. Your score will not suffer when you check your own report, so make sure that you regularly request a copy from each of the three major credit reporting bureaus. This include Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.