When you want to improve your credit rating, do it yourself credit repair involves taking active steps to remove negative events from your credit history. From taking steps to remove negative records to building up positive reports, you can effectively increase your consumer score with some effort extended over time. After obtaining a copy of your credit report, you are ready to begin the process of improving your consumer credit rating.
Remove Negative Events Past the Statute of Limitations
Old, unpaid debts and collections can show up on your credit record for a period of up to seven years. This time period does not begin until six months after you made your last payment on this debt. For do it yourself credit repair, you need to contact the bureaus who hold your records and have these past debts removed from your history. Although these debts will not be on your record, you still owe the debt, and a new collection agency that purchases the debt may begin collection efforts. If you make any payment at all, even after the debt is removed from record, it can go back on your record to start the time process all over again.
See our Statute of Limitation removal letter in our Do it Yourself FREE Credit Repair Kit
Remove Unverifiable Collections
Credit Reporting Agencies Act states that collections efforts on a debt can only be on record if they are complete, accurate, and verifiable. You will need to send a debt verification letter, available in most do it yourself credit repair kits, to the collection agency in question to start the process. They have 30 days to provide you with a copy of the signed agreement you made with the original creditor. If not, the debt is not verified and may be removed from your history. Once you have negative events removed from your record that are both past the statute of limitations and those considered unverifiable, this could go a long way to improve your credit rating.
See our Debt Verification letter in our Do it Yourself FREE Credit Repair Kit
Pay Down Debts
Creditors and Credit Reporting Bureaus not only look at payment history, but how much available credit you maintain. Make an effort to pay down your total debts to below 50% of what you have available to help improve your credit rating. You can do this by making payments on each of your debts or by paying some of the smaller ones off completely. Remember do not close any accounts once they are paid off. Keep credit accounts open to maintain a higher total credit limit amount available so that you are only using a smaller percentage of available credit at any given time.
Consolidate Debt
If you can fit all of your debts into one or two accounts, this consolidation can make it easier to pay down debts. Try to choose an account that offers the benefits of little to no interest for a period of time, typically 12 to 18 months. This interest-free time period will give you a slight advantage by having any payments applied directly to the actual debt, rather than on interest. Making regular payments will help to not only lower your debts, but will help help to improve your credit rating by providing recent, positive records on your history. When paying down or consolidating debt, these do it yourself credit repair efforts will take time to make an impact. However, if you stick with it, you will start to see improvements over time.
Opening New Credit
One method to increase your consumer credit score with do it yourself credit repair methods is to open a new line of credit. Recent records on your report can help boost your overall rating if they are positive. This means keeping up with monthly payments for a period of at least 12 months in order to see any results. Again, try to use less than 50% of what you have available for the most positive influence.
Co-Signing for Credit
If you are having trouble opening new accounts on your own because of your negative history, you can try to see if a family member or a friend with good credit will co-sign for you to open a joint account. In the alternative, you can ask if you can be added to an existing account that has a positive payment history. Make sure you are not just added as an authorized user, but as a person who is responsible for repaying the debt in order to help to improve your credit rating.
If you are only an authorized user of the credit line the credit reporting bureaus will not look at this as positive credit history because you are authorized to spend but not responsible to repay the debt. Anybody can charge up a credit card but your ability to pay it back is what gives you a strong credit rating.