Are you looking to finance a car or dreaming of buying a house? Could you benefit from a boost to your credit score? If you aren’t sure where to start, here are some tips for easily boosting your credit score quickly. No, these tips aren’t a fix all and the best that you can do is be responsible with your credit over the long haul, but there are things that you can do to make credit work for you a little bit better.
Order Your Credit Report. First and foremost, you need to order an updated copy of your credit report and verify that all of the included information is correct. There are often mistakes found on credit reports and simply discovering them and disputing them can clear up a lot of credit reporting errors and raise your score.
Pay Down Your Credit Cards. Did you know that your credit card utilization (how much you have available, vs. how much you have spent) severely affects your credit rating? 30% of your credit score is your utilization. You definitely need to keep this number below 30%, but ideally it will be lower than 10%. So if you have $1000 of credit available, you want to stay below $299, but the closer to $90 or below you get, you will see a nice score boost.
Ask for a Credit Limit Increase. This ultimately does the same as above and benefits your utilization. There are a couple of things to note however. Do not immediately go charge it up and also, be sure to confirm that your credit card company isn’t going to run a hard credit inquiry in order to raise your limits. These inquiries will lower your score, which defeats the purpose.
Don’t miss any payments. That’s a given, I know, but it should be noted. The best way to good credit is to be responsible and pay your bills on time every time. And if you do have some late payments, the further you are from them, the better.
Have you found any awesome credit score boosters?
