• Do pay down revolving credit card debt to below 30% of the available maximum balance.
• Do Not close accounts unless you have too many revolving accounts and all of your accounts have little or no balances. (2-4 open accounts is a good rule of thumb)
• Do Not consolidate debt onto one or two cards and close other cards, or lower your existing credit limit as your outstanding balance declines. Doing so may artificially skew the appearance of your credit utilization.
• Do review your credit report with each credit bureau for accuracy, whether good or bad. Entries that have "maxed out" balances even with no late payments represent higher risk.
• If you have a dispute with any item on your credit report, send a letter regarding the dispute (with all available documentation attached) in overnight mail with return receipt requested. The Fair Credit Reporting Act gives the repository five days to notify the reporting creditor of a dispute and request an investigation. Within 30 days, the reporting creditor must report back to the repository regarding whether the disputed entry should be modified, deleted or remain unchanged. If there is no response regarding the dispute, the repository must remove the item from your file, but if, for example, 10 days later the reporting creditor reports back that the entry is correct, it will be added back into the your credit file. If there is any change to your file, the repository must notify you, the consumer, within 5 days of the change.

Remember, collection accounts and charge offs will not necessarily disappear from a credit file after seven years, if unpaid those accounts could be sold to collection possibly resetting the clock.

Judgments & bankruptcies stay in credit files up to 10 years and unpaid tax liens stay in a credit file forever, and just because an account is paid to zero it will continue to appear in the file for the seven years before being purged – it was late. The only way to eliminate the impact of an inaccuracy on a score is to have the inaccuracy modified at the repository level. Until the issue is modified at the repository, your credit score will be negatively impacted. Information in a credit file changes daily.

In summary:

• Pay your accounts on time;
• Use credit conservatively (keep balances below 30% of available credit);
• Apply for new credit very sparingly;
• Refrain from "credit surfing."

And your credit score should go up.

For more information on the credit scoring system, how it works, and how to improve your credit score, please click on the link below and purchase my new book and this very important topic.

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