Credit Repair: How to Help Yourself

How does do it yourself credit history repair work?  You can fix your credit problems not by changing your history exactly but by changing your future.  You will need to go back in history and discover when the problems began and what caused them. If you were a victim of fraud, this would have had an impact on your file. Don't worry, you will be able to sort it out.

You will know by now that you should make sure that there are no errors on your file that are affecting your score.  You can have these mistakes corrected and that should be your first step in your path to a better credit rating.  You need to check payment history and the credit limit on each account as this is where the most mistakes seem to appear.

There are various things that impact your credit score including your payment history, the amount of credit you have outstanding, how old your accounts are and how many new credit facilities you have tried to open recently.  The things that do not have any bearing will be your sex, race, religion, marital status and whether you have any child support or similar issues outstanding.

You have complete control over the number of new searches that appear on your record so you need to avoid applying for additional borrowing.   If you absolutely must have new borrowings, you need to make sure that you only apply to the company that is most likely to say yes.  Obviously make sure all your paperwork is in order and that you have supplied everything the company has asked for.

When you look at your records, try to keep your credit balances under 60% of the total amount of borrowing that you could potentially take advantage of.  This will help you to get the higher score so if you can make some over payments to bring your total under this magic ratio it will help a lot.

Look at the age of your accounts and when choosing the accounts you should be closing, keep in mind that the older accounts will help you boost your score.  So it may be worth closing some newer facilities and keeping the old ones open.  This will depend on the type of facility you have as another factor that will affect your rating is the number of different type of accounts you hold.  Potential lenders like to see you managing a mixture of facilities and not just loans or credit cards.

It can take up to 45 days before you will see any major improvements on your score so be patient.  This is not an overnight process.  It depends on how bad your individual circumstances have been and how long ago the problem or problems happened.  It will also depend on how far action did progress i.e. someone who has suffered bankruptcy, judgments or repossessions will have a harder job when undertaking do it yourself credit history repair.