Your Credit Score is one of your biggest financial assets and the one that can be the most dangerous. If your credit score is high, your borrowing rates will be low and therefore you'll save hundreds of dollars on the interest rate. The big mystery is how to maintain a high credit score. Well if you want to either maintain or repair your credit score, you are in luck, it can take as little as two months to raise your credit rating. Although 2 months is an estimate and can take a lot longer depending on you score in the first place.
Your credit score is based on a few key factors, there is no particular order in which I will discuss them (Some of them have higher weights in regard to the score).
Registered income (there are other factors as well).
To repair or increase your score the below list of procedures may help you. Some will work better than other, but they will all help.
1.) Pay off all revolving credit cards. Revolving credit cards are like Discover card or any other monthly credit cards that you pay at off all of the balance at the end of the month or a set number of days, such as 60 or 90 days. People also refer to these as charge cards. Although you might pay before the deadline, credit card companies account the debt owed on a monthly basis which may be before the deadline. On your credit score it will not show as bad debt, but it will reduce your overall score. The typical recommendations are as follows. If you have one credit card, pay it off before the months end. Second, if you have two credit cards, pay the minimum on both of them and work on paying in full one of them first.
2.) Registered Income. This is your official salary from work. Basically, the numbers they crunch are matched with what you earn. If your debt is larger than what you earn, your credit score is dropped. So, if you are an independent contractor or your income is just a little too low get a part time job. This will rise your possible earnings and increase your capability to repay your debt and therefore increase your credit score.
3.) Check your credit score online with one of the official companies to see what or why your credit score is the level it is. This will help you determine what you can really do to increase your credit score. There are some very good sites that do give a free 30-day trial. This allows you to see what is being recorded about you without paying it, well at least for 30 days. But I would recommend that any person looking to keep a good score should sigh up to a service to keep an eye on their score. If you can purchase a credit score monitoring service, it will protect you from fraud and help inform you of ways to increase your credit score when needed.
You must also check that the site service works for your country, so read the fine print.
4.) Do not apply for every car, credit card, mobile phone contract and home loan that you are looking at as an enthusiastic customer. Because every time you try to purchase a home, car, or get a new credit card your credit score is checked and the crediting agencies lower your score if you have had two or three credit checks inside a few months of each other.
5.) Lastly, open a savings account and budget your money accordingly that you will always have extra cash to help in times of need.
Protect your credit score because it can mean everything when buying a home or trying to get some capital for whatever purpose you need it for. It is not hard to raise your credit score, it is hard to preserve it. If you can purchase a credit score monitoring service, it will protect you from a scam and help notify you of ways to increase your credit score when it is needed.
We'll next look at the some of the basic safety tip that anyone with a credit card should be taking.
While it is always advisable that you have more than 1 credit card, in case it gets lost, you should never have more credit cards than you need to use. The major reason why this is the case is because it becomes tougher to keep a track of which cards you have and where you have kept them with the more cards you have.
How many times have you been asked what your card number is only to find yourself looking for your card to get the number? Now, what happens if you have a card stolen and no credit card statement to-hand? You have a problem! For this reason, it is always best practice to take photocopies of you credit cards to so that always know where to find the number should anything unlucky happen to your card.
because likely as not if you have lost your card, or if it is stolen, then you'll have lost or stolen the receipts as well. Now there is no way for you to vouch which purchases were yours and which were not. Or there is no way for you to tell which was the last genuine transaction you made, as sometimes we all forget that we used this card and not the other one for the purchase.
Moreover, never keep a record of your PIN with your card, this is only asking for trouble!
If you are ever asked to give your credit card details to someone you don't know, or who has started a discussion with you (rather than the other way around) over the phone or via email. You should always refuse. Worst come to the worst, phone the card issuer and ask them if it is okay for you to tell the information or phone the enquirer back. If the enquirer seems reluctant to accept this, you must ask yourself why! This will be a warning sign for you, so be careful.
Now, what if you complete this with your credit card details filled it in. Now suddenly half the world has access your credit card number, expiry date and signature! It will go through the post system (that's a few thousand people there you don't know), admin people at the receiving end and where ever else it may be travelling through.
Although the above may sound like basic credit card safety tips you already know, you would be surprised to see how many people fail to follow one or all of them! especially if you are new to credit cards and the power that they actually hold.