How to improve your credit score

8:00 AM Credit, improve, score No Comments

| By Liz Weston

These simple steps will help you keep to qualify your credit rating and at the best possible prices.

Lousy credit scores, you can a financial cost.

You pay higher interest rates, higher insurance premiums and greater security deposits for mobile phone and utility service. Provided that your applications are not easily denied. Bad credit can you prevent the mortgage, the home or the desired insurance plan.

So troubled results renovation or expansion of credit which pays nothing, from. The following steps can speed up the process:

To kill the lies. Many credit reports contain errors, some of them serious enough to affect your creditworthiness. The only place online to see your free annual credit card is annualcreditreport.com. Don't fall for look-alike or similar locations. Focus on the big mistake that you find, such as accounts, not yours or the payments, which as been reported are too late when they were made in a timely manner.

Some debts disappear making. One of the best and fastest ways to improve the mediocre credit scores is to pay off credit card debt. The FICO credit scoring formula pays a lot of attention to the amount of the credit card that you can use against your credit limits. Balances include more than balances on installment loans (mortgages, car loans, student loans) from the revolving lines (E.g. credit cards).

If you cannot pay your credit cards now below, you should move some of the debt on a personal loan. Credit unions often offer three year personal loans with fixed interest rates and payments.

A different, far more complicated maneuver is credit cards with a 401 k loan to pay off. Loans from the workplace retirement show on your credit report, which is not so it is gone the way of the debt. But if you lose your job and quickly pay off the loan can not, you are a fat tax liability and the future to lose, you could have made tax-deferred returns.

Liz Weston

Use only a fraction of your available balance. A reader emailed me after looking at one of their FICO scores. She said her score was lowered because she are larger than normal credit card had credit. "I my credit card balance completely each month pay!", she protested.

FICO formula it doesn't matter whether you pay full or in instalments. What counts is reports the balance you owe that to the day that your credit card company his accounts to the credit Bureau.

So, if you want better results, you need to charge, how much to limit. You charge the less, the better. With 30% or less of your limit is good, 10% or less is best. FICO "Achievers" - with credit scores above 785-- take on average 7% of their available credit, according to a study from MyFico.com.

Piggybacked onto a foreign good creditworthiness. A foreign credit account can get credited increasing your credit scores, if the other person responsibly handle credit. This doesn't work with all accounts, so that you can check with your card issuer.

And wisely choose your cardholder. An another reader, Tammy, added to her college age son as an authorized user of credit build their credit cards for him to help. She ran into hard times and began, carrying a large balance.

The map "appear on his credit report with a high debt ratio, as no card is his own," wrote Tammy. "Will it hurt his credit score, to remove him as an authorized user of this map? "I want no more damage."

Temporary her son only credit account would in fact more damage. That is his best mixture can add another map, and a map will be secured.

A secured card will receive (and use) You need them some money, typically $200 to $2,000, as pay deposit for the card. To create credit, the account should report all three credit bureaus. You use the card, lightly but regularly and punctually pay the Bill. (Don't expect that your account will be paid from your deposit – that happens only if you default.) Here you will find a good card secured by CardRatings.com, CreditCards.com and NerdWallet, among other sites.

Add a rate loan. Thomas had a good job and no debt. Credit scores were what he did not get his credit history in another country (Holland) was built. He started with the construction got credit with a secured credit card, and then a second, unsecured account. He asked what to do next, to further build his credit, so that he could get a mortgage.

"I am planning my car pay in cash," he wrote "or should I not do that?"

In his case, could it be useful, a substantial down payment and have a relatively short term loan to the beneficial effects of paying off a loan rate to get.

The little things not sweating. Karl was furious, as he a letter from the lender, that it was turned down for an auto loan. The thing was, that he had already bought the car through a loan from his credit union. The second loan application an error was started by the car dealers but never broken. Karl wanted to know what he could do to get the second investigation from his credit report.

Adverse credit requests are annoying, but the damage was probably minimal. The FICO formula counts all auto loan requests within a short time related extends as a single request. Mortgage requests are handled the same way.

Usually a credit score, to 5 points or less, reduced an individual investigation and even the small negative effect fades away completely within a year. She should open a whole series of new accounts in a short time, but you have to take care also no single request overly.

Neither must you keep obsessive over your notes, as soon as you FICO of 750 reach levels or so. In addition, you gain greater access to credit or lower interest rates higher values. Only balances responsibly to use, and you should be the best deals available.

Note to readers: after Sept. 30, my latest column and blog posts will no longer appear on MSN Money. You can still follow me on my site, ask Liz Weston, or connect with mean on my Facebook page.