Credit Repair Services

How to Build a Credit Score That Lenders Will Love

The first step in restoring your credit is knowing what your score is. The average credit score in America is around 690, and that range has been set for several years. If you are below that, you are below average. If you’re above a  690, you’re probably wasting your time reading about credit repair. Either way, lenders will judge you based on your score making a high score valuable.  If you don’t know what your exact 3 credit scores are, you need to first get that information. You can’t fix what you don’t know

You can obtain a copy of your credit report from AnnualCreditReport.com once a year for free. Or if you don't know your scores from the 3 major credit reporting agencies TransUnion, Equifax and Experian, you can access them by clicking here

Check Your Credit for Inaccuracies and Negative Reporting Items

Once you have a fresh copy of your credit report, check for inaccuracies and negative items. If you have things that need to be removed, that’s where a good credit repair agency comes into play. It pays to have a professional take care of the dirty work for you. Professional credit repair companies know their way around credit card companies and how to communicate effectively with credit bureaus.

If you would like to speak with a good credit repair company you can trust, we highly recommend Lexington Law. We have them as part of our favorite five and think you should too. You can call them @ 1-800-1-877-243-094

Hide the Negative with Positive Trade Lines

Once you have all those pesky negative inaccuracies off your report, your next step will be building up some positive stuff.  Because your credit scores may be a bit lower, the best way to do this is through a secured credit card or possibly a low balance unsecured credit card.  We recommend a secured card because this type of financing is for all credit types good and bad. As you make payments each month, your card company will report your good pay history to the credit bureaus which can help your overall score.  While doing this, it’s also important you pay all your other bills on time. Any late payments reported to your credit history will lower your score.

Consolidate Your Debt and Improve Your Credit Score

A big part of your credit score is something called your credit utilization. This is the amount of credit available to you versus the amount of credit you are actually using.  Ideally you want to be below 30%.

For example; if you were to add up all the limits on your various credit cards and the total was $10,000, you would only want to have charged or an open balance of around $3,000.

Consolidating your credit cards with an unsecured debt consolidation loan can help improve your credit utilization.  When you pay off your credit cards with a consolidation loan, you won’t eliminate your debt, but you will make it look more attractive.

For example; if your cards are at their max and you have 10,000 in credit card debt, then obtain a $10,000 debt consolidation loan to combine those cards into one payment, once you consolidate you’ll have $20,000 in available credit but only $10,000 in use. This would put you at an instant 50% credit utilization versus 100%. Keep in mind; this is only true if you keep your cards open. If you close out your credit cards, you will be right where you started.  You’ll have $10,000 in available credit (the loan) and $10,000 accessed. You will have closed out the other $10,000 of available credit which was your cards. This would not help your score. Make sure you keep those cards open, and cut them up so you don’t spend on them any further.

Generally speaking, closing down all of your credit cards is a bad decision when it comes to your credit score. You want to have a few accounts reporting on time payments to your credit history for several years to reach the highest credit score possible.