1. Use goodwill letters to remove late pays – This is one of easiest and fastest ways to increase your credit score, although it might take 30 days for it to have any effect. First, order your credit report and find any late pays that are within the last two years AND that are for companies with whom you still have a relationship today (For example, a current credit card that you still use but have paid late in the past). Call them or write them a letter explaining why you were late and ask them to remove the late payment. You would be surprised — most of these companies will do it if you give them a good, plausible reason why you were late. For them, it’s good customer relations.
2. Increase your credit limits – This is done by calling your credit card company and asking for higher credit limits. What this will do is lower your current debt-to-credit ratio, raising your credit score. Again, you would be surprised — a lot of credit card companies will raise your credit limits quickly without checking your credit reportand then report this higher credit limit to the credit agencies within 30 days.
3. Remove inaccurate, negative information. Look at your credit report and make sure all the negative items are really yours and are accurate. If anything does not look right, then go ahead and dispute it. Also, make sure the “date of last activity” is correct. Remember that negative items have less of a bad effect on your score after 2-3 years, so you want to make sure these dates are accurate and have not been “re-aged” to more recent dates. Also, make sure these dates are the same from all three credit bureaus.
4. Add yourself as an authorized user on the account of a friend or family member who has a good credit score. With their permission, of course! This method has been abused in the past and as a result credit scoring companies have vowed to stop using this as a factor in credit scoring. In reality, we have found that the credit scoring companies have not yet updated their programs to account for these statements. In other words, this method still works as of today.
5. If you have high debt, create a plan to pay it down. If you have have debt levels and you are close to being maxed out on your credit cards, figure out ways to reduce your debt. I know, I know … you might be thinking, “If I could quickly and easily pay back all my high debt, I wouldn’t be on the web seeking financial advice!” But as hard as it can be, we can’t stress the importance of this enough. See if you can borrow money from a friend or familiy, pay down your debt, get a new lower interest credit card, and then pay your friend or family member back. If you have the cash, simply paying down the debt will increase you credit score if you can get down to anywhere near 30% utilization. For example, if you owe $1000 to Credit Card XYZ, pay off at least $700 as soon as possible. Obviously, the less debt you have, the better, but at least get to this ratio.

By following the tips above, you can find ways to raise your credit score quickly and without much work. These tips also let you focus your efforts on the (sometimes little) things that make a big difference in your credit scores. Time is precious and raising your score quickly is important — so be efficient in your efforts rather than spending time doing things that have no real effect!

1. There is nothing you can do to improve you credit score; you just need to wait for it to get better. There is nothing further from the truth. By understanding how credit scores really work and by making sure your credit report accurately shows your past history, you can improve your credit score. Anybody who tells you something different probably has an incentive to keep your credit scores low.
2. Negative items have to legally stay on your credit report for at least 7 years. Collection agencies and other companies have been saying this for years, but nothing could be further from the truth. These companies can remove any information they want, whenever they want. There is nothing legally stopping these companies from removing inaccurate information at any point of time. They do have to remove it after 7 years, but it could possibly be sooner with your intervention.
3. Credit repair is ethically wrong because you are trying to fix your past mistakes – you should have to answer for those mistakes with your bad credit. Again, most people assume credit repair is used by irresponsible folks who have taken on too much debt and then just stopped paying their bills. In reality, most cases we come across involve people who have had bad circumstances happen to them (divorce, medical issues, job loss, etc.) and are not simply irresponsible people who are trying to get around the system. Additionally, oftentimes the issues are not black and white, and there is fault on both sides of the issue. For example, were you really late on payment if you never got a timely bill from the company that says you were late? Technically yes, but in reality we say it’s not exclusively your fault because you never had a chance to get it right.
4. Filing a statement on your credit report will help you explain your side of the story. Although it might feel good to get your side of the story on your credit report, this is probably not a good thing to do. First, most companies just look at your credit score without looking at the details of your credit report, so they won’t ever see this statement. Another issue is that by giving a statement you might be legally admitting to things that you may not want to. Since there is very little positive benefit to adding a statement, we don’t recommend you do it.
5. My good credit history will offset my previous bad credit history so in the end everything will be fine. This is again a myth because negative credit history has a huge impact on your credit score, while positive history has a much smaller effect. By removing inaccurate negative history, you can rapidly raise you credit score. If you simply wait, it will take much longer. We tell our customers that negative items are at least 10x more powerful than positive items.

By understanding how credit scores work and taking a proactive approach you can keep your credit scores high. This does not have to take a lot of time or intricate knowledge — just a small amount of time on your part can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime!

Here are the five surprising things about credits scores you probably didn’t know. In fact, some will probably shock you — they might just be the exact opposite of what you expect:

1. Your income does not have any direct effect on your credit score. You could be a billionaire, but have a very low credit score. Credit scores are based on information from credit agencies, but these agencies have no idea how much money you actually make! This means a billionaire can have a much lower credit score than the guy who cleans his pool.
2. Closing old accounts will probably lower your credit score. Your credit history is an important factor in your credit score, so closing old accounts (more than 1 year) will probably lower your credit score because it will remove that history from your credit report. It will also lower your credit ratio (the amount of credit you are currently using compared to the total amount of credit you have available to you). Even though you are trying to be financially responsible by closing these old accounts so you are not tempted to use them, this will probably cause a lower credit score!
3. Paying off collection agencies or other debt from more than two years ago won’t help you much. This one is pretty strange because it seems like the right thing to do, and in fact, paying down your current debt can definitely help out your credit score. However, credit scoring systems look at the last date of activity on your account, and if the collection (charge-off is how it’s usually called) is over 2 years old, it starts to lose its negative power. When you make that partial payment, guess what happens? The date of last activity clock resets to the day you make the partial payment on the charge off, causing your credit score to plummet! In this case it’s better to not pay anything, or negotiate a one time settlement with the collection agency in exchange for removing some of the negative info.
4. The entire credit agency system is comprised of and controlled by private companies that are regulated by the government. Credit agencies collect information about you for FREE from various companies that you do business with, and then resell the data back to other companies and to you. The government has never licensed these credit agencies to do this, but over time has started to regulate the industry. Remember that these credit agencies are public companies and are not government agencies. You could actually buy shares (become a part-owner of a credit agency) if you wanted to!
5. Timing is very important for credit scores. Most negative items lose their power on your credit score after 2-3 years. That is why we always teach our customers to focus their energies on recent, negative items first.

Credit scores are far from a perfect system, and can sometimes be determined in a way that seems counter-intuitive to you. Therefore, it is important to educate yourself as to how credit scores really work, so you will be able to make the right decisions to keep this very important number as high as possible.