10 Unusual Ways to Raise Your Credit Score
Raising your credit score can be easy with some simple changes. As credit scores have an impact on financial products like insurance rates and loan interest rates, a higher score could lead to a brighter financial future. Here are some ideas that can help improve your credit score:
1. Consider piggybacking on good credit histories. Adding yourself to a family member’s or friend’s account in good standing could raise your credit score.
2. Keep older accounts, as they positively affect credit scores. They demonstrate a history of maintaining credit and add to the amount of credit you have access to, which decreases the percentage of available credit you’re using, raising your score.
3. Set up automatic payments, which can help improve your credit score by avoiding late payments and fees.
4. Pay credit card bills more than once a month to lower your debt utilization ratio, which compares how much debt you have to the size of your credit limit.
5. Request good-will deletions, which ask credit reporting agencies and lenders to remove items affecting your score based on a prior good history.
6. Avoid pre-approved offers and creating too many accounts.
7. Avoid opening new utility accounts and transfer utilities to a new address instead.
8. Remember library fines, as unpaid bills can decrease your credit score.
9. Avoid online quote comparisons, which count as inquiries on your credit score.
10. Establish long-term credit with lenders, as credit scores go up based on positive relationships.
Raising your credit score takes careful planning, but it’s possible with these strategies.
Removing Errors From Your Credit Report
Taking the time to review your credit reports on a yearly basis can be beneficial. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission recently conducted a study that revealed a quarter of all consumers have at least one mistake on their credit report that is negatively impacting their credit score. It could very well be that your reports have one or more errors as well.
Fortunately, the same study found that 80% of those who dispute wrong information on their credit report were able to have it changed or removed. That’s a fantastic outcome!
If you are looking for ways to remove errors from your credit report, you’ve come to the right place. Having errors on your credit report can not only make it difficult to get approved for loans or other financial products, but it can also lower your credit score. Fortunately, there are several ways to have errors removed from your credit report and improve your overall credit rating.
The first step is to identify any errors that may be present. You can either check your credit report yourself or use a credit monitoring service to help you identify errors. Once errors have been identified, it’s important to contact the credit reporting agencies and dispute the errors. You can take this one step further and write a dispute letter to the specific credit bureau that is reporting the incorrect information. In the letter, include a copy of the credit report and any evidence that supports your claim.
Another way to have errors removed from your credit report is to contact the creditor directly and ask them to investigate the inaccuracy. If the creditor is unable to verify the accuracy of the information, then they must remove it from your credit report.
Finally, if the errors still remain after taking these steps, you may want to consider hiring a credit repair company or attorney to help you in the dispute process. These companies or attorneys can help you contact the credit bureaus and creditors, as well as provide valuable advice on how to best handle the situation.
No matter what steps you take to remove errors from your credit report, it’s important to act quickly and stay organized. By doing so, you can ensure that errors are removed quickly and your credit score remains intact.