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Some people have bad credit and just leave it alone, but even bad credit can be turned around.
Fact is, whatever your credit is like right now, you can improve it.
The worst thing you can do is give trust to the credit reporting agencies.
They are not 100% accurate at all and that comes at your expense.
Let's go over some things you should do.
1.
Get a copy of your credit report with all 3 major agencies.
Think it's all the same? Think again.
If you've never seen a credit report, you are going to be surprised.
Some accounts could be on one report but not on another.
The result is a different credit score per report agency.
2.
Verify your information.
If you have a good account that's missing on your credit report, get it on there.
Contact the company and the reporting agency to get it listed.
3.
Be smart.
Does paying off collections help you? Actually, no.
More about this later.
Many people mistakenly rush to pay off things that show up-you might not even owe the debt.
Be careful here.
4.
Dispute bad items.
There's most likely mistakes on your credit report that's costing you.
Contact the reporting agency about these issues and get them to verify the data.
5.
Utilization kills you.
If your credit available from all credit cards is say $1,000 and your total balances equal say $800, you're using 80% of your credit.
This is bad, very bad.
Ideally, you want to keep your utilization under 30%.
It's possibly that you're losing 100 points from this one issue alone.
It's that important.
6.
Stop applying for stuff.
Only apply for something you really need and that you know you'll get approve for.
"Hard pulls" can hurt your credit score, especially manual reviews.
It looks like you're just grasping at straws.
Try to keep your applications to a minimum.
There's a lot more you can do to repair credit and improve your credit score.
These are just a handful of quick points to get you started.
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