Building good credit takes time, know-how
You might want to improve your credit score as quickly as possible, but credit is generally more of a marathon than a sprint. Creditors want to see that you have a long history of responsibly using credit and paying your bills before they offer you a large loan with great terms – and you can’t prove that in just a few weeks or months. However, there are a few tricks that might help you improve your credit score quickly, and several tried-and-true methods for consistently improving your credit score over time.
How to improve your credit score in the short-term
If you want to quickly increase your credit score before applying for a new loan, credit card or apartment, three options include:
Pay down credit card balances
Your credit utilization ratio compares your balances and credit limits on revolving accounts, such as credit cards. A higher utilization ratio is worse for your credit score, and people with the best credit scores tend to have an overall utilization ratio in the low single digits.
Many credit scores only consider your most recently reported information to calculate your utilization ratio. Card issuers generally send updates to the credit bureaus around the end of each billing cycle – about three weeks before your credit card bill is due. As a result, you might have a high utilization ratio even if you pay your credit card bill in full each month.
If you regularly pay your bill in full, one trick is to pay down the balance during your billing cycle until you’re only using a small portion of your credit limit. A very low utilization ratio might actually be better than no utilization, so don’t pay off the balance completely. Then, pay the remainder of the bill after the billing cycle and before the due date to avoid revolving a balance and paying interest.
Even if you can’t pay off your balance in full, paying down your credit card balance can help your credit scores. Although, depending on the timing of your card’s billing cycles, you might need to wait more than 30 days to see the impact.
Add new accounts with positive payment histories to credit file
Having credit accounts with long histories of on-time payments is important for getting an excellent credit score. And if you’re new to credit or only have a few credit accounts, additional accounts can help “thicken” your credit file, which could be good for your credit score.
However, applying for and opening a new account can also hurt your credit score at first, which means it might not be a good idea if you’re focusing on improving your credit in the short run.
Instead, you could ask a relative or friend who’s good with credit to add you as an authorized user on one of their credit cards. The card issuer might then report the account’s entire history to the credit bureaus under your name, which can quickly add a lot of information to your credit report and help your credit score (assuming the primary cardholder uses the card responsibly).
Another option is to look for programs that let you add other types of accounts and their payment histories to your credit reports. For example, you could use Experian Boost to add eligible utility, phone, streaming service and rent payments to your Experian credit report. And eCredable can add utility, phone and internet payments to your TransUnion credit report. Other services focus solely on rent reporting.
Keep in mind, the accounts can help your credit score only if you’ve made your payments on time and they’ll only affect scores based on that credit report. Adding a new account to your Equifax credit report won’t impact scores that are calculated based on your Experian or TransUnion reports.
Look for and dispute errors in your credit reports
Another option is to look for errors in your credit reports that may be hurting your credit scores, such as misreported late payments or collection accounts for debts you don’t owe. By law, creditors and the credit bureaus have to investigate any non-frivolous and relevant disputes and either verify, collect or delete the information.
The credit bureaus generally have up to 30 days to investigate disputes, but they may respond more quickly. And if something that’s hurting your score is corrected or deleted, that could immediately improve your credit score.
However, if you’re trying to improve your credit quickly because you’re applying for a mortgage, speak with your loan officer or mortgage broker before submitting any disputes. Having an open dispute might delay the underwriting process or keep you from getting the loan.
What affects your credit score?
The three tactics above might help you quickly improve your score, but understanding how credit scores are calculated and why these actions can help your scores is also important. Most credit scores are based solely on the information in one of your credit reports, and the main scoring factors are often put into five categories:
⬤ Payment history: Your history of making on-time payments, which helps your credit, or late payments, which can hurt it. Your payment history can be one of the most important scoring categories.
⬤ Credit usage: The number of accounts you have with balances, your outstanding balance on credit accounts, and how much you owe on credit cards relative to their credit limits may also be very important.
⬤ Credit length: How much experience you have with credit, measured by the age of the credit accounts in your credit report. Although this is important, it’s not as important as your payment history or credit usage.
⬤ Credit mix: Your experience with different types of credit accounts, such as loans and lines of credit, can also affect your score. Generally, this is a relatively minor scoring category.
⬤ Recent activity: Whether you’ve recently applied for a credit account or opened an account can also be important, but this is also often a relatively minor category.
Within each category, there are different characteristics, or questions that the scoring model asks. The answers to these questions – the credit attributes – can lead to your credit score rising or falling.
For example, the scoring model might ask how many times you’ve been at least 30 days late on any of your accounts in the past year. You’ll score the most points if the answer is zero, and you’ll get fewer points if your answer is one or higher.
The value of the attributes often depends on one another, which is why the exact impact of any particular action or change in your credit report will depend on your entire credit report. For instance, a late payment might hurt your score by 80 points if you have otherwise perfect credit, but only drop it by 40 if you have several late payments.
Tips for increasing your credit score over time
You might want to increase your credit score as quickly as possible, but don’t forget the long game. If you want to have an excellent score – and keep it – there are a few best practices that you can try to follow:
⬤ Pay all your bills on time: Your ontime payments can help you build positive credit history if your accounts are reported to the credit bureaus. But you want to pay other bills on time as well. Otherwise a past due account might be sold or sent to collections, which could hurt your credit scores.
⬤ Open and use credit accounts: Continually adding new on-time payments to your credit reports can be helpful, which can only happen if your payments get reported to the credit bureaus. Fortunately, you don’t need to go into debt. Even using a credit card for one small subscription and then paying off the bill in full each month is enough to show ongoing positive activity.
⬤ Pay down and maintain low credit card balances: It’ll help you save on interest and keep your utilization ratio low, which is best for your scores. Some newer credit scoring models also consider trends in your payment history, and regularly paying down or off credit cards could be important.
⬤ Don’t close old credit cards: Keeping credit cards open can give you more available credit, which can make maintaining a low utilization ratio easier. However, it still might be worth closing (or trying to downgrade) a credit card if it has an annual fee and you’re not getting enough value from the card.
You may also want to look into a free or paid credit report monitoring program to help you keep an eye on important changes in your credit report, such as new negative information or fraudulent accounts.
You can also look for free credit score tracking programs to help you monitor your progress.