Hello all, Through the great people at this site, I no longer have any negative information on my credit reports. Now that I have completed that long battle back, I have another question. What do I do now to increase my scores further? My scores for the three bureaus are as follows: TU: 643 EQ: 670 EX: 645 The reason my scores aren't over 700 is mainly due to my debt load and balance/credit limit ratios. It's funny, since I got many of my current credit cards and loans to help build positive credit. Now, the fact I have these loans and credit cards is hurting my scores. I am also listed as an authorized user on several of my wife's accounts. Much of my debt showing on my reports is attributed to these authorized accounts showing on my report. Any ideas on steps I can take to increase my scores further now that the "easy" step of erasing my negatives has been completed?
You can: -Pay down your balances -Let your accounts age -Get more new credit to reduce your debt to CL ratio (double edged sword, that could bite you later) Just my 2 cents
love, on the "letting the accounts age" point, many of my accounts are a couple of years old. One thing I'm curious about, is the removal of the authorized user accounts from my report. I'm wondering if this will help my score because of lower debt, or hurt it because of fewer positive accounts, shorter credit history, etc.. Any thoughts on that one?...
RNG as to what will actually happen...could go either way...why not take it off...if score sinks, wait two months put it back...the age of the account won't be affected since your an AU...maybe, I'd try it with 1 and see what happens, especially if the balance is high AND you have no negs...CONGRATS on that!!!
Thanks soup! I'll try taking off one and see what happens. It took a lot of work to get my reports clean, but I couldn't have done it without this board and the great members here. This is one powerful website! For those of you out there struggling in credit hell (I'm still not totally out of it yet), keep fighting, and keep posting on the board. The people here will help you prevail...
That's a very long story! My credit went bad in 1996, so I guess you could say the ordeal took me almost the full seven years to fix. But, I would say 80% of my success came during the past year. That was when I learned about the fair debt collection practices act, and also started to aggressively fight the credit bureaus and the collection agencies. I found that getting tough (i.e. suing CA's and CRA's) got the quickest results, as well as endless streams of letters demanding deletion because of failure to validate, etc. It's a little frustrating though, since my scores are still in the mid 600's....mainly due to the debt I created trying to get "positive credit" during the rebuilding process! I'm working on that part of it now.
