How To Build Credit – Here Is My Story On How I Improved My Credit Score Over 150 Points
I can remember a few years back when I had a poor credit score, and more issues on my report than I care to remember. I had no idea on how to build credit. Here I was with a credit score in the low 500’s and nobody would approve me for anything, without ripping my head off with ridiculous interest rates. Luckily though I had a background working around credit, and that made me start to take a deeper look into how to build credit. I want to share with you my story and how my credit has bounced back.
First it’s probably good for you to grasp where I started at. In 2003 I opened a firm and ended up not doing to well with it for some time. It was my first expedition into being self-employed and this caused some real havoc on me financially. I could not afford to put gas in my car at times, much less the money to pay for my obligations in a timely manner. I ended up getting things together, but by that point the damage was done. I had several credit cards that ended up being charged off and the bill collectors were coming after me.
In December of 2007 I had a car that started breaking down on me. I was 28 years of age and I needed to ask my dad to cosign on a loan with me so I would not need to pay a loan rate at around 18%. By having him cosign for me I was able to get a rate at 4% and I still have that auto to this day. I have saved thousands of dollars in charges because of this. This, incidentally, was the 1st credit I had since the problems I had in 2003.
With having this automobile loan now reporting on time payments, ultimately I was able to get approved for a credit card in May 2008, but the limit on the card was only $400. While that was great and all, with my past credit report it took a long time for any other company to approve me for anything. Another option for me at this time also would be to get a secured credit card to couple with the other credit I was establishing.
Come to find out, the credit limits on credit card accounts have a ton to do with our abilities to get more credit. The higher your credit limits, the better it is for your credit. Think about it, if you’re signing up for another credit card and had some problems in the past financially, then it’s very difficult for any company to get a good read on whether you’d be a good credit risk. This holds especially true if you’re available revolving credit is only $400.
This is when I started learning about credit repair. I had a choice to make. I could either wait for seven years minimum for this info to fall off my credit report, or I could kickstart things and learn the way to do the credit repair. I chose to kickstart things, and I’m so happy I did. To make a long story short, I’ve been ready to get almost everything removed except 2 things, one being an open charge off account which has had some daft charges added to it. I could even bring a court action against this company because they’re obviously violating my rights because they haven’t been able to come up with a full accounting of how they got their figures. This account is booked to fall off in a few months so I haven’t bothered.
Obviously I have had a pretty important improvement in my scores with all three of the bureaus. I’ve now qualified for two more unsecured credit cards and will continue to see major enhancements in my scores over the next year. Now knowing exactly how credit works, I also got a $5,000 credit line that reports to the agencies. Now this is not a conventional account, and I can not utilize it for much of anything apart from to purchase ebooks online from their site, but it is’s an awesome account to have which has helped my credit score rather a lot, and opened up the door to afford me the opportunity to get the unsecured mastercards.
Had I not known how to build credit, or learned credit repair then I’d be nowhere near where i am at the moment. This has got me thinking, because I’m truly no different than anybody else which has had problems financially in the past. The single difference is that I learned how to build credit and I want to be well placed to share my experience and information with anybody that is willing to learn. These strategies work 100% of the time if implemented correctly, but this is all done with the long -term under consideration. If you have got a long-term vision you can also have these types of results.
