Did you know that your credit score is a critical thing when it comes to your financial future? It can help you to get your loan application approved easily, get favorable loan repayment terms, and enable you to get a credit card. A good score can also give you an upper hand when seeking job positions and help you to get apartments to rent as well as pay less deposit for utilities like telephone, water, and power.
Raising your score is not an overnight affair but a process that takes several months. The time needed depends on the reasons why it dropped in the first place.
Below are three straightforward things that can help you to raise your credit score:
Pay Your Obligations Or Bills On Time
Among the factors that determine your credit score, payment history is the most important and determines 35% of your score. The issue of how quickly you settle your payments and bills matters a lot. Your credit score can plummet drastically due to late payment or default, which could lead to collections, bankruptcy, and other such things. The result is that it could be difficult to get any credit approved, for example, loans, mortgages, credit cards, and so on. The secret is to ensure that you remit your payments on time each month or payment cycle. To avoid incidents of forgetting those payments, you can automate them by instructing your bank to pay on a given date or simply automate the payments.
Get Added As An Authorized User
Those who are just starting out financially whose scores are still low may employ the tactic of getting added as authorized users on the credit card accounts of people who have good payment histories. Even those who had good scores but dropped over time can use this strategy to improve their score. However, you may not always have a relative or a friend with a good score that is willing to add you as an authorized user on their accounts. The best option for those who want to boost their score is to engage credit repair firms that will help them to get tradelines for a price. The tradelines, which are accounts with a good history, will then be added to the poor credit reports to improve them and make the scores increase. Those with poor scores can, therefore, boost them, which in essence is to buy credit lines since the good scores as a result of paying for repair will enable them to get various debt products including credit lines and loans.
Keep Your Credit Card Accounts Active
Though putting aside your credit card is a good idea, especially when trying to recover from poor ratings due to the overuse of plastic money, it may lead to some issues. The credit card issuer may assume that the account is dormant and close it down. The effect of such a shutdown is the lowering of your total available credit and raising your utilization ratio.
Credit utilization ratio refers to the ratio of your debt and your overall credit limit. When your card account is closed due to inactivity, your overall limit is reduced, thus your utilization ratio rises. High credit utilization of above 30% makes your score drop. You should thus ensure that you keep using your credit card so it remains active and the account is not closed to help you improve your score.
Conclusion
There you have three simple ways to improve your credit score as advised by a financial expert. You also need to keep a close eye on your credit report to dispute any errors that may hurt your score as well as avoid applying for several credit products in a short duration as this results in hard inquiries that damage your score.