How do I raise my Credit score?
I have no late bills and nothing in collection (almost two years now). I have been making good money for near two years now. I had multiple credit cards but i got rid of most and kept the oldest and the newest i keep both without using them. I have paid off two vehicles in full with no late payments on either one and i have 2 current auto payments. my debt to income ratio is low (i make much more money than i spend). BUT MY FREAKIN SCORE HASN"T CHANGED IN 4 DANG YEARS...............WHAT DO I DO?
Public Comments
- You'll probably get a ton of good copy/paste answers on here, but check this site out. They have a lot of information. http://www.creditboards.com/forums/ edit: to guy below me. Use your cards, but do not pay them off in full every month. Take the minimal payment and pay a fraction above it. You're going to pay some interest, but it will show initiative to the credit companies that you pay your bills and a little more.
- Use your cards and pay them off monthly. This will help raise your score. Good luck!
- I'm trying to make heads or tails out of this. Based on what you've said this is what I was able to get from it: 1. Even though you don't have anything in collections and you've been paying on time for the past 2 years, chances are at one point in time, you've had late payments and collection accounts. It takes 7½ years for negative information like collection accounts to stop reporting on your credit. Late payments are easier to deal with becuase usually they lose their effectiveness after 3 years or so. 2. Congratualtions on having a livelihood that's been good to you, but whatever you make, that amount is not reported to the credit bureaus. 3. With the credit cards, you've made 2 key mistakes: a. Cancelling cards- you take away payment history, available credit, and shorten the average age of the open accounts you have by cancelling them making it look like you've been establishing credit more recently than you have. b. Not using the credit cards you still have open. Credit cards do nothing for your score if they're not being used. Not that doesn't mean for you to go haywire and max out the cards, no that's not what I'm saying. The scoring system is designed to where you should be showing minimal usage of your cards, no more than 25% of your combined available credit for all your cards. 4. As far as the auto loans, how old are the loans? If they're older than 3 years or more, then that's not going to help your score much. And on the current loans, how long have you had the notes for? It takes at least a year of payment history for it to start positively reflect on your credit report. 5. Now you say that your debt to income ratio is low, but how does it look on paper? What debt to income ratio really means is the total debt that you've borrowed vs. the amount that you still have available to borrow, not your income, directly. When was the last time that you had your credit line increased? You may need to request a line increase on all your cards across the board. That would help that ratio. Hopefully this will make a little more sense to you, Good Luck !
