Antoine writes in to the Get Out of Debt Squirrel and asks:
I don’t have credit card dept of any kind. I’ve never filed bankruptcy. I have bills on my credit report some of them I’m unaware of and the others are overdue bills. How do I go about solving the problem to get it off my credit report? How can I make my score go up? Please help me.
Antoine, Never Fear, the Get Out of Debt Squirrel is Here. Yeah I know, corny. But I just had to say it.
Tackling a bad credit score is both easy and important to do. A bad credit score can hold you back from cheap insurance rates and access to cheaper credit. A bad credit score and and a bad credit report give you higher monthly payments. Let me put it this way, I can’t think of a single advantage to having a bad credit report.
Legally Improving Your Credit Report is Easy
Armed with the right information and the right tools it can be easy to improve your credit report. Now doing this will cost you a little bit but better to make a small investment to get a big reward, much better credit.
Stop Fooling Around The first step is to stop fooling around with all those free credit reports you hear about and just go straight for the gold standard in credit reports. A really good consolidated credit report, like you can get online here, will give you all the information you need to know to:
- Identify your creditors.
- Compare each of the three major credit reports side-by-side to see who is actually saying what about you.
- Using the creditor contact information on the credit report you can contact those you don’t recognize to either make payment arrangements or settle the debt in full.
- If there is any information on your credit report which is not correct, the credit report will give you the information you need to contact each individual credit bureau and ask to have that information removed.
Legally Improving Your Credit Score is Easy
Online credit score tools will easily show you what changes you need to make to improve your credit score. With the right credit score tools you can see how much your score will improve by repaying certain creditors or doing specific things like closing credit or getting credit. Since the mac daddy of credit scores is the FICO score, don’t mess around, go to them and get your score online now to best model how to improve your credit score. That’s what I do.
The FICO folks even provide a free credit score estimator you can use online.
You’re Almost Done, But Not Yet
As crazy as tis sounds Antoine, you need to get some new good credit to add to your credit report. Without new good credit to add it will be hard to neutralize your past credit transgressions. Don’t apply for a gas card or store credit card, those only bring down your score.
Instead go for one of these easier to get major credit cards to get back in the credit game, get it reported to the credit bureaus and starting making your credit report and credit score look as spotless as it possibly can.
Take a look at these cards of an example of what I’m talking about. You can also find more here in the credit card section.
Do You Have a Question for the Squirrel?
If you would like to ask a question, don’t be shy, ask it online here.
Popularity: 67% [?]
Frugal Squirrel - first, please stop gnawing on the siding of my house - it causes a great deal of noise. Secondly, good advice on getting back into the credit game. Thirdly, you might want to take a look at P2P lending sites like Prosper dot com as another method of revitalizing a credit score.
Eric’s last blog post..Social Lending is not Socialism