Improve your credit

1) What is a credit score ?

A credit score is a number that indicates how likely you are to pay a debt. That's it.

Your credit score is :

30% the amount of debt you owe to lenders
35% payment history
10% credit mix (credit card, car loan, mortgage, student loans)
10% new credit accounts
15% length of Credit history

2) Where to check your credit score for free?

Now a days, there are million advertisements to check your credit score for free but there only three credit bureaus that lenders actually utilize when it comes to giving you a loan:

You can check all three for free here.

Lenders do not look at or use your vantage score (2.0 or 3.0) that you get from places like credit karma.

3) Starting with bad credit

If you're credit is low, there's a likely hood that you've had issues in your past paying loans on time or perhaps you've defaulted on a loan. If you're looking to improve your credit score, the overall strategy is to remove negative remarks from your credit report. To do this, you're going to have to "troubleshoot" each issue one by one.

You're going to want to utilize these things:

1. Pay your delinquencies:

Offer a percentage of the loan in question in exchange for a deletion of the collection from your credit score. Usually collection agencies buy your loan for a fraction of the loan and they usually never collect anything. They are desperate to get paid. Your initial offer should be 30% of the collection.

2. Utilize goodwill letters

Write a heart felt letter saying how you messed up and why your loan should be forgiven. This next part actually works so don't judge it but google executives of your lending company and email them explaining that you are apologetic and deserve forgiveness.

3. Dispute your delinquencies with the three bureaus:

Transunion

Equifax

Experian

4) Open lines of credit

I thought about leaving this off because it's the utmost risky play if you have bad spending habits but the more lines of credit you able to open and use responsibly, the higher your credit will go. If you are able to treat a credit card like a debit card meaning you only spend money that you have, you can get a lot of free perks and improve your credit. If you have bad spending etiquette, opening lines of credit with a mid or low score will tank you credit for a very very long time. The total opposite direction we want to go in. You want to pay of the full balance of a credit card monthly.

4) Starting with no credit

When you don't have any credit reported on your credit report, you're going to need some. You would want credit when it comes to taking out consumer loans like a auto or mortgage loan. Your credit score and income are the two things that determine the APR a lender will give you. There are few way to improve your credit with no credit.

1. Get a secured credit card

The secure it card is phenomenal. It works like a debit card as in you put a hard credit line up, usually $500 and in return, discover will give you a credit card with a $500 limit and after 6 months, it will graduate to an unsecured card (regular credit card).

2. Get bills in your name

3. See if your apartment complex can or does reports to the credit bureaus

4. See if someone will add you to thier line of credit as an authorized user:

This method has nearly been patched with the anti gaming algorithms of a credit score but how it essentially works is that someone you presumably know adds you to thier unsecured line of credit as an authorized user. They hopefully are known to pay thier bill on time and have a good score. Being authorized user is added to your credit report. So basically, you receive thier credit score. But sometimes, your score barely changes.

5) the biggest tip: credit utilization

This category of the a credit score had to get its own section. Credit utilization is so simple it's insane. You simply request credit limit increases on your lines of credit every 6 months and you don't change your spending habit at all. As your available credit goes up and your spending stays the same, your credit utilization goes down because you are using less and less of your available credit. The crazy thing is, this whole process is 100% free and will raise your credit score pretty fast. The only downside, is that the memory of credit utilization is low so month to month you have to not really use all your available credit. That's issue with the system, not the method

6) Get plugged into a community

My favorites are:

Cheers! 😁