What Are The First Steps to Improve My Credit Score?
Building your credit and credit score up takes some time. Yet the quicker you seriously turn your attention towards the factors that are harming your credit score, the more rapidly your credit scores will rise and improve.
There are a number of practical steps that you can take to get these moving in the right direction. It starts with gaining a history of paying your bills in a timely fashion and paying down your debt. Beginning with this article we look at practical, actionable steps that you can take to boost your credit.
Make A Commitment to the 90 Day Credit Challenge
I encourage you to commit to a 90 day credit challenge. You should set yourself a 90 day goal to see at least a 100 point improvement in your credit score. You can do this most easily in two ways.
- First, pay down any credit card revolving balances that are in excess of 30 percent of your total available credit line. This will significantly improve your score in the second most important category of credit utilization (which counts for 30 percent of the total score).
- Second, make sure you pay all of your monthly balances on time for those three months. This will improve your payment history points, the most important category in credit scoring models (counting for 35 percent of your total). By taking proactive action in both ways, you can see a 100 point improvement or better in your score within three months.
Negative Information Eventually Ages Off Your Report
For your credit report to improve substantially, it will help when the negative or derogatory items drop off. This includes items ranging from too many hard inquiries on your credit report to late payments, charge offs, collections, and bankruptcies. These different detracting features take different amounts of time to disappear from your credit report.
Hard inquiries are the easiest to lose. They only need two years to disappear. Late payments, charge offs, and collections require seven years to drop. They will cause less negative impact as they age. Bankruptcies take from seven to 10 years to disappear. They also impact you less as they age.
You should not let negative items on your credit report keep you from working on improving it, as they will all disappear eventually, and will impact you less each year as they age.
Don’t Let Bad Credit Hold You Back From Achieving Financial Freedom!
- Includes Over 50 Proven Quick Start Tips
- Improve Your Score in 45-60 Days or Less
- Smart Do It Yourself Credit Repair
