One thing you can do to really alleviate some bad credit is to sign up for automatic bill payments. The most important factor in assigning someone a good credit score is to make sure they pay their bills on time. Even a small mishap is enough to knock your score down a bit. And you wouldn’t want to get a bad hit on your credit score for a silly mishap like accidentally forgetting to pay the bill even though you could have afforded to. And some people may be uncomfortable with setting up automatic payments, which makes sense in some cases. You may have varying charges from month to month or you may find yourself having difficulty paying one month and you want to avoid an overdraft fee. But there is still a simple and similar solution to this difficulty. If you would rather not sign up for automatic bill payment you could try signing up for bill payment alerts. They will send you an email or text message to remind you when a bill is due so that you don’t accidentally forget, but they won’t automatically withdraw the money from your accounts. Making sure you make timely payments is crucial to your credit score. Timely payments over a period of six months could mean the difference between a six hundred credit score and a six hundred and fifty credit score.
If you have the money, the next best way to fix your credit score is to pay down on your debts. This has to do with the credit scoring measure that deals with credit percentages. When you have a high credit limit but you are only using a portion of that available credit it is calculated into your credit score. A quick and easy way to bring down your usage and subsequently bring up your credit score is to pay off those debts. If you have the money to make a large payment at once this may be the right choice for you depending on how well you manage regular payments. If you know that you will be able to make timely payments on a regular basis this is the superior option. As much as paying down revolving debts really helps to improve your credit score, making regular payments will help even more. The regular payments will help establish a long term history which allows you to maximize your credit score gains with each payment. But if you have a really high credit usage, this usage could be doing more damage than making regular payments might help. Any usage percentage above approximately thirty five percent is likely to be negatively affecting your credit score. If you have something in the extreme such as eighty or even one hundred percent credit utilization, your best option might be to make one large payment, but still leave some usage that you can make regular payments on.
Of course there are lots of ways to fix a bad credit score that may be even better for your credit. But unfortunately, truly repairing a credit score in these ways will take some time. It can definitely be worth the effort, but not everyone has the time to work on a long term fix for their credit. When you need good credit and you need it fast, these tips are some great options to get the ball rolling, and will help you as part of a larger, long term plan of action to repair your credit score.
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