Do it yourself credit repair does not require any special knowledge. You don’t have to be an accountant, nor do you have to pay a credit repair agency to help you. The fact is that no one can repair your credit but you.
Others can only give you tips to help you out. If you have bad credit, then you have to do the credit repair yourself by taking the necessary steps.
First Get A Free Copy Of Your Credit Report
Do it yourself credit repair tips include getting a copy of your free annual credit report. You are entitled by law to get a free copy of this report once a year. This will give you a list of all your bills and tell you how much you owe.
It will also tell you if you have been late with payments or have missed them completely. You will have to do the credit report repair yourself by being more diligent in paying your bills. Doing credit repair yourself also means you should take a good look at the outstanding balances you have on your accounts.
Focus On One Easy Strategy At A Time
One of the do it yourself credit repair tips that you should consider when you are trying credit repair yourself is to take the bill with the lowest amount owing. Take extra steps to pay this account off in full.
Accounts paid in full show up as favourable items and go a long way towards credit report repair. When you take this approach to credit report repair yourself, you will find that if you pay as little as an extra $50 on one bill per month, you will have it paid in full a lot faster.
After The First Repair It Gets Easier
Once you attempt credit repair yourself, you will find that it gets a lot easier as you go along. The first few months may be difficult, as doing credit report repair yourself requires you to stop spending on frivolous items.
Look at something you really want to buy and ask yourself if you really need it. If the answer is no, then don’t buy it. When you start paying more money on bills and get them paid off, you will have extra money left over to pay for the frivolous items.
Doing credit repair yourself is something that you have to work at. It will not show up in your credit report next month, but when you get your free annual credit report next year, you will see a big difference.
You can realistically do credit repair yourself, if you know how.
How does do it yourself credit history repair work?
You can fix your credit problems not by changing your history exactly but by changing your future. You will need to go back in history and discover when the problems began and what caused them.
If you were a victim of fraud, this would have had an impact on your file. Don’t worry, you will be able to sort it out.
You will know by now that you should make sure that there are no errors on your file that are affecting your score. You can have these mistakes corrected and that should be your first step in your path to a better credit rating.
Check That Your Payment History And Credit Limits Are In Order
You need to check payment history and the credit limit on each account as this is where the most mistakes seem to appear.
There are various things that impact your credit score including your payment history, the amount of credit you have outstanding, how old your accounts are and how many new credit facilities you have tried to open recently.
The things that do not have any bearing will be your sex, race, religion, marital status and whether you have any child support or similar issues outstanding.
Stop Applying For Credit While Repairing Your Credit
You have complete control over the number of new searches that appear on your record so you need to avoid applying for additional borrowing. If you absolutely must have new borrowings, you need to make sure that you only apply to the company that is most likely to say yes.
Obviously make sure all your paperwork is in order and that you have supplied everything the company has asked for.
When you look at your records, try to keep your credit balances under 60% of the total amount of borrowing that you could potentially take advantage of.
This will help you to get the higher score so if you can make some over payments to bring your total under this magic ratio it will help a lot.
Start With Newer Accounts And Work Backwards
Look at the age of your accounts and when choosing the accounts you should be closing, keep in mind that the older accounts will help you boost your score. So it may be worth closing some newer facilities and keeping the old ones open.
This will depend on the type of facility you have as another factor that will affect your rating is the number of different type of accounts you hold. Potential lenders like to see you managing a mixture of facilities and not just loans or credit cards.
It can take up to 45 days before you will see any major improvements on your score so be patient. This is not an overnight process. It depends on how bad your individual circumstances have been and how long ago the problem or problems happened.
It will also depend on how far action did progress i.e. someone who has suffered bankruptcy, judgments or repossessions will have a harder job when undertaking do it yourself credit history repair.