How To Improve Your Credit Score This Year

It’s not uncommon to hear someone muse that their credit score is not where it needs to be. Perhaps you have a rough year with work and you were forced to use your card to pay your expenses and ran up your debt significantly. Perhaps you missed a few payments, made some late payments or just didn’t have the money to pay the bills from time to time, and now you’re finally in a better place. It’s unfortunate, but it’s also something that happens more often than you might think. Now that you’re back on top and looking for a way to improve your credit, we have a few suggestions for you that might make this year a great chance to improve that number and your life as a whole.

Transfer your debts

Do you own a business? If you do and you have a business credit card, it might be in your best interest to transfer your own credit card debt to those cards so that it is now part of your business debt rather than your personal debt. This can have a positive impact on your personal credit score.

Stop closing accounts

It’s so tempting to pay off a debt and then close the account to prevent yourself from making the same mistake again, but it’s a bad idea. It isn’t always a good idea to close older accounts that make your credit history appear longer and better. Do this very sparingly, if at all.

Ask for more credit

It seems counterintuitive, I know. However, asking for an increased credit limit is a great way for you to lower your debt and look like you have much better credit. If you have one card with a $10,000 limit and you have $9,000 of that utilized, it looks like you have used 90% of your debt. Ask for an increase to a $15,000 limit and it drops that percentage and looks a lot better.

Negotiate

Can you call your creditors and ask for lower interest rates, higher limits or anything else that might make your score look better? Try it out and see. The worst they can tell you is no.

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