subject: How To Increase Your Credit Score To Get Better Loans [print this page] Raising your credit score to a good enough rating is necessary to be able to apply successfully to borrow money from a lender. Your credit score is one of the main deciding factors lenders look at when considering your application for credit cards, mortgages or any other type of loan, and the conditions of said loan. Even if you haven't suffered a foreclosure or bankruptcy that would damage it greatly, your credit rating may be low due to having never worked on raising it. Raising your credit score isn't difficult, and can be done by yourself without paying fees to any credit clinic companies.
To start raising your credit score, you need to request a free credit report to know where you stand. This will allow you to detect anything that may be harming your credit rating and fix it.
If there's no outstanding problem with your credit rating, such as late payments or excess loans, your low credit score may be due to never having requested any credit. Credit score is built by keeping up with the payments from your credit, specially short term ones such as credit cards. Any credit card whose outstanding balance is lower than 30% of your limit will help your credit rating if you pay the full outstanding amount every month. Never go behind on your payments, or leave the balance grow over 30% of the limit, since that may hurt your credit rating instead of helping it. The best way of benefiting from this is making small payments on your credit card regularly, then paying the balance in full at the end of the month.
Another thing you can do to raise your credit score is start using your old credit cards. Credit card providers may stop updating then at the credit bureaus. However, the older a line of credit is, the better. So instead of getting new credit cards, start using old ones that you had forgotten about. You can also negotiate with your lender to raise your credit card limits, since that will make the difference between your balance and your limit bigger, which will improve your credit score. A thing to avoid is consolidating your accounts and concentrating all your credit card balances on a single card. It's generally better to have a few cards with small balances than one card with a big balance.
If you are raising your credit score from poor or mediocre, any positive thing you do will have a greater influence that if your credit score is over 700 to start with. However, keep in mind that any damaging thing such as a late payment will hurt it much more than any positive, so pay special attention to avoid them. If you follow those simple guidelines your credit rating will raise every month. This will not only give you access to a wider range of loans, but also to better conditions such as lower interests rates.
