Improve Your FICO Credit Score By 50 Points or More Quickly!

By MySpendingPlan.com Editorial Staff

Tips for Improving Credit Score:

• Analyze your credit reports from each of the three major credit reporting bureaus (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion) and check if there are any errors on them.  If there are, contact the bureaus and have the errors corrected.  Their websites will outline these procedures.  Make sure you get your actual FICO score from MyFICO as well - there are other "credit scores" out there, but most lenders look at actual FICO scores.

• Do NOT close credit card accounts that you have paid off.  Assuming the annual fees are not outrageous, just keep them open and do not use them (cut up the cards!).  Your FICO score is higher if you have a low debt to available credit ratio (the more unused credit, the better) AND the age of your credit history helps (the older, the better, of course).
• Try to negotiate with your lenders directly if there are any wrong or negative items on your credit report.  All your negotiations should be in writing.  Dispute all incorrect entries and also the negative ones.  With repeated negotiations, your creditors will correct the wrong entries which will boost your credit score considerably.  Companies like Lexington Law can really help here for a reasonable cost.
• Write letters to your debt collectors or to the debt collection agencies and ask for written proof that all the accounts they are collecting on are indeed yours.  Most agencies do not have such proof, whereby they can definitely prove that the bad accounts are yours.  In the absence of such proof, it is extremely easy to get them to remove these accounts from your credit file.
• If a family member or a close friend (someone who trusts you completely) has very good credit, you can become an authorized user on their credit cards.  This way you can use their good credit to improve your credit score.  However, you must make sure that you do not misuse their credit cards.  They do not even have to give you an actual credit card.  They can just add you as an authorized user and hold on to the card itself, if it makes them more comfortable.
• Open new accounts that have high available credit limit.  But use as little of this available credit as possible.  By maintaining a high credit limit and very low outstanding balances, you can increase your FICO credit score practically overnight!
• If you have any old accounts that have been paid up and have clean credit history, you should add these accounts to your credit file.  This can increase your FICO score considerably.
• Use the Rapid Rescoring service.  This service enables you to add new updated credit information to your credit file in less than 3 days from the time all disputes have been confirmed.  It also allows you to get wrong entries corrected within days instead of the months that it takes normally.  With this new information, the 3 main credit bureaus can do a rapid rescoring of your credit score, which typically results in a higher credit score.  To take advantage of rapid rescoring, you have to contact a Rapid Rescore Service.  The QuickScore service offered by Kroll Factual Data is a great place to begin.

So by monitoring your credit score regularly and taking these steps to improve it, you can increase your score by 50 points each month and by as much as 150-200 in all.