Good credit is important to functioning in society today. When you have bad credit, life can be difficult. Unfortunately it is easy to make mistakes in handling your credit which leaves you with a low credit score. When you have a good credit score you have many more advantages when it comes to leveraging your wealth. Raising your credit score can be done.

First you want to obtain your credit reports from all three credit bureaus. You can do this by going to the Equifax website where you can order a 3 in 1 report that will show your records from all three credit bureaus. You can also find out what your FICO score is. You can even choose to monitor your FICO score if you want so you can tell how well your credit repair is working. Be sure to pull your records from all three bureaus. These are where your creditors report to but they may not report to all three so your reports may be different. You want to find out how many black marks you have with each bureau and investigate your reports for errors.

When you get your reports, go through each one thoroughly. This is vital to start your credit score repair. A lot of the information will be identical but some will be different. You will also find that each bureau figures your credit in a different way and can give you a different score. Not all of your creditors will report to all three of the bureaus and you can never be sure which bureau report a potential creditor will pull so you want to repair them all. Make a note of every derogatory mark on your reports.

After this begin work on removing negative marks on your credit reports. Do this by sending hand written dispute letters to the credit bureaus. They make forms available for this purpose but you may get a better response if you hand write your dispute so the employee who opens it can tell it is a real dispute from you and not an automated letter from a credit repair company. Your dispute will be read by a real person at the credit bureau so you are probably better off to handle your correspondence in a personal way.

Attack the errors on your credit reports. When you get false information removed you might see a sudden jump in your credit score. If the derogatory remarks are valid then the credit bureau will not remove it if it is verified by the reporting creditor. In that case, you can contact the creditor directly and ask them if they will remove the negative mark. If you are a current customer in good standing, they may do so.

Decide to either make payments or let bad credit expire. It may be best to leave old bad credit marks alone. Most of them will expire and be removed from your credit report seven years from the date of last activity. If you dispute an old bad credit mark, it might re-age it so that the seven year clock starts all over again. This will make your credit score go down because it shows as a new bad credit mark rather than an old one.

Juggle your credit cards around and you might see a quick rise in your credit score. It is best to keep your available balance between 30% to 50%. If you have one card that has nearly zero balance and one that is close to being maxed out, move some of your balance over so that both of your cards are in the 30% to 50% range.

Please be careful with new credit lines and old accounts. Having an open old account on your credit report will be a benefit to you even if it is not currently active since the credit bureaus factor in how long you have had your credit established. New accounts on the other hand will probably lower your score for awhile after you open them. Your credit score fluctuates frequently depending on your actions, that is why it is so beneficial to monitor your credit. You can do that at the Equifax website by signing up for their Equifax Credit Watch Gold, plus it provides you with identity theft protection in the amount of $20,000.

Since you are reading this article, you know how important good credit is. These few steps can help you improve your credit and help you maintain good credit. You may think you need professional help from a credit repair agency, but it really isn’t necessary since you can do it all yourself. It is at least worth a try before you spend money on credit repair.

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