I'm gonna give you a 10-day plan to get your best credit score It's no secret that your credit score it. It really is just a game.
They're not an indication of how well you handle money. You could be really great at your finances, but having a low credit score may be due to an injury or plenty of other reasons why you might have a lower credit score than just the way that you handle your money.
So what I'm gonna do is give you 10 days, and each day I'm gonna give you something to work on to make sure that you can improve your credit score in the best way possible and as quickly as possible. That way you can save money whenever you're looking at getting a loan and getting approved for a loan is a lot easier.
So why in the world would we want to get a better score? Why do we wanna play the game of credit? Primarily it's so we can get better interest rates. Getting a better interest rate on something like a mortgage will save you tens of thousands of dollars compared to having a lower credit score.
Also, it's gonna give you access to better loan options, especially in competitive markets like we're in right now. In competitive real estate markets, you wanna have access to the most favorable loans. That way when you put in an offer, a seller is more likely to select your offer than if you had an offer on a loan that was less interesting to a seller.
Also, it's easier to get approved if you have a higher credit score. That way you don't have to go through the uncertainty of whether will this work. Will this go through, do I need extra documentation that's required for a lower credit score?
Now, one quick thing I want you to know before we jump into this is please don't fall for the trap of debt recovery. If you're at a spot where your credit score is kind of rough right now, and you're trying to figure out what to do, It's really tempting to see all these different advertisements for things like debt recovery.
What they will do is they will trash your credit score. And try to settle your debts for less. Now, that could be a strategy that you may wanna look at, but it's going to be extremely difficult for you to move forward with buying a house if you go with one of these debt recovery plans.
I'm not gonna show you anything that's some sort of scam or hack. These are try-and-true ways to build your credit score in the best way possible.
It's important to remember also that a good credit score does not cost a dime in interest to be able to build. You do not have to pay interest. To be able to get a good credit score, you don't have to do this with this plan.
On Day One, we need to first figure out where's your starting point before you work on building. Because for a lot of people, they're in different spots. You might be at a spot where your credit's a little bit lower, or you might have some pretty moderate credit. Maybe you have great credit and you just wanna push it as high as possible to get the best interest rate possible.
All these tips are gonna apply to you, but we need to figure out our starting point. And the best way to do that is to understand how much everything that we do actually matter.
So your payment history is going to make up 35% of your credit score. Your utilization is going to make up 30%. Your credit length is 15%. Your new credit. 10% and the types of credit you have are 10% as well.
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So you're gonna have three credit scores, one from Experian, one from TransUnion, and one from Equifax.
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Now, all three of these credit bureaus might have different things on your credit report. Some creditors, let's say a credit card might report to Experian and TransUnion, but not Equifax. Then a student loan might report to Equifax and TransUnion, but maybe not Experian. So having all three is gonna give you a full picture of where your credit is at.
Now what I want you to do is I want you to get a free credit report. You can go to AnnualCreditReport.com. This is authorized by the Federal government and they are required to give you at least one credit report for each bureau per year.
Now, something to know here is that you're usually not going to see your credit score, but you will see your credit report, and we don't need the score at the moment. We just wanna see what's actually listed on the report. It has zero impact on your score.
But what we wanna do here is we wanna find any errors or any negative items that are on your credit report. These could be things like collections, or late payments. Things like that. So, if you're a paper and pen kind of person, print out your credit report from annual credit report.com and then I want you to go ahead and go through the circle what are some of the negative items, what are errors, what are things that need to be addressed on the credit report that we need to take a look at, because we wanna take actions on those later, which I'll walk you through.
We already figured out our starting point and where we're at. Before we get into actually working on things, because a lot of people just kind of aimlessly work on their credit, and when I hear people say they work on their credit, they don't really have a plan in place.
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They don't know what their budget is to even work on their credit with they just kind of keep paying down cards and say that they're working on their credit and that's their plan. So you first need to start with what is your budget? Because we need to identify two things.
Those two things are, does your current spending keep increasing your debt? Is every month is your debt increasing? If so, you will never be able to work on your credit in a way that's going to bring it down, because as your debt keeps increasing, then it's going to lower your score over time. So we first need to identify. Is what your current spending habits are, those keeping your score down.
Do you have some monthly cash that comes in that you could use to start tackling some debt? So we first need to stop overspending if that's happening and increasing more debt.
Also, we then need to start looking at it. What money do we have available to pay down debt? So there are so many different ways that you can budget and everyone has their own preference. I really like a tool called You Need a Budget that does zero-based budgeting. There's also every dollar that does zero-based budgeting as well.
There are a couple of Google Sheets that you can purchase or download online that will do different types of budgeting for you. Or you could just use paper and pencil. It really just depends on what you want to do, but you need to figure out first, what kind of money is going out and what money is coming in that you can use in your plan to start tackling some debt.
We need to actually plan out what are our goals for how we're going to improve our credit and get the best credit score. We had an idea of where our starting point is at. We can see the accounts that we have from AnnualCreditReport.com. Also, any errors that we may have or any negative items that we could work on.
We also need to plan what our goals are. Otherwise, we're just going aimlessly be working on credit forever and never know exactly when we wanna move forward with buying a house. So I see this happen so much where especially people who have middle credit scores, they might have a 680 and they sit on the sidelines of buying because they think that they need a 740 or higher, when in reality that's just not the case.
So first to plan what our goals are, we wanna see what our current score is, and really the best way to do this is to look at your credit card provider. If you go to their website usually they'll have a free credit report right there which can also show you everything on your credit report.
You know, some of those negative items or errors or balances that you have, but also what your actual credit score is. And usually, that's gonna be one of the best ways to get a free credit score and see that up to date as much as possible.
Now, once you know what your credit score is I wanna see how close are you to a 640. 640 tends to be kind of the magic number in the mortgage world of making loan approvals a lot easier. When you hit 640, you start getting a lot better interest rates on things like FHA loans, and also it's just a lot easier to get approved for these loans. If you have less than a 640, it starts to become really difficult, not impossible, but it starts to become difficult to get approved for a mortgage without other you know, factors that are working in your favor, like a load that to income ratio, higher down payment or reserves in your bank account when you end up buying a home.
So 640 I think, is a really good target for a lot of people. Of course, the higher your credit score, The better interest rate and better terms you're going to get. But 640 is a really good target, I think when you're looking at buying a home.
Next, I want you to take a look at a forecasting tool, like a credit score simulator. So I like to use Score Master. That's what I use for my personal credit score. And so I'm gonna walk you through how you can simulate your credit score. So what things you can do with your credit cards to add points to your score? One option you can use for simulating your credit score is through ScoreMaster.
They have a tool called Score Boost, and what this is going to do is help you see what kind of payment can increase your score. For example, our current score is 639. What this will do is show us what kind of spending we might have and the impact that would have on our score.
So for instance, maybe I have let's say an additional $2,000 in credit card spending, and how that could impact my score? And then also the opposite, if I'm paying down my credit cards, what kind of points could be added to the score here?
So $4,000. Would add a simulated or an estimated 30 points here on the score. So we can then take a look at what is the goal score that you want. So again, 640 is a really good target if you're in that lower range.
Next, a really good target is 680, then 720, then 740 after that. So maybe this is something that I want to do.
If you scroll down,it'll show me each account, the points that could be added what timeframe, and how much money I would need to spend. So for instance, to add six points in 11 days, I would need to pay $869 by August 30th. This can help you start planning your timeline a little bit better by seeing what kind of money do I actually need to see momentum change in your score.
So, included in your goals, you also wanna figure out what is your timeline. If you need to add 30 points to your credit score you can see from a simulator. How much money it might require to get to that point? So when we looked at our budget, Maybe you had an extra $500 per month that you're able to start working on paying down any credit cards, for instance.
So over that, how long, how many months is it going to take you to get to that point where you can pay down the amount that you need to get to the score that you want?
Now, if you wanna use ScoreMaster if you go to WinTheHouseYouLove.com/credit, you can get a seven-day trial for $1. If you want to explore that with you know, using that credit simulator inside of ScoreMaster.
So, Day Four is gonna be a little meaty. We're gonna look at fixing errors. Now, this day is gonna be quite a bit of work but it's gonna make up 35% of your score by looking at our payment history. Payment history is, makes up 35% of your score, so we need to make sure that as we look through here are there any things that we need to clean up in our payment history.
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Are there things that happened in the past that we could address? Are there things in the future that we could look at to make sure that we don't run into any issues?
So late payments are going to be the number one thing holding most people's credit scores back. It's going to just tank your credit score to have late payments, even just one.
So we need to look at if that late payment was actually true, you weren't able to make that payment for whatever reason. Doesn't mean you're a bad person at all, but what we can take a look at is if you had an error, then we want to take a look at a dispute. And what a dispute is it's when you basically say to the creditor, Hey, there's or to the credit bureau, Hey, there's an error here.
This shouldn't be listed this way, so it'll open up an investigation which usually can take up to 30 days where the creditor can come back and respond with evidence on whether that is an error or not. And you get to provide your own explanation and evidence as to why you believe it is an error. So I'll have a letter for what's called a dispute letter that you can send to the credit bureaus to initiate disputes.
And again, these are for if there is an actual error on your credit report. You know, there was a late payment for you know, maybe it was just an error reported. And you want to get that taken off.
Now, if you have if you actually made a late payment you can't just dispute it, the creditor's gonna have evidence as to why it was a late payment, if you had a late payment. You know, maybe it was a one-time thing. Maybe your bank account didn't have enough money in it. Or maybe the autopay, you switched car, you know, you switched bank accounts and autopay didn't work, but now your payment is, payment history is clean. You've been paying everything on time now. You could request what's called a goodwill deletion.
We ask the creditor, Hey, would you be able to delete this just out of good, out of goodwill because I've been up to date on my accounts? Now that's something you could take a look at. It's not a guaranteed thing that will happen where a creditor will take that off. But it is something you could take a look at as an option. There's no harm in trying it.
Now one of the nice things about ScoreMaster too is you can take action using what's called ScoreBuilder to address any errors on your credit report. So for instance, it will show you a screen of what's hurting your credit score. So I can take a look down here and see all the accounts that may be affecting my credit score and the effect on them.
If I scroll down, I can see the actions that I can take on my credit report, like fixing credit reporting errors, getting a goodwill correction paying off, or negotiating small debts and removing identity theft.
So, for instance, I can click this button, and it will show me the accounts one by one, and then give me options on things that I can do with it.
So, for instance, with this fake Citibank account. Let's say I had this you know, late payments here, and maybe they were errors. So I could click fix error and I can correct a credit reporting in accuracy by selecting a reason. So maybe I'm looking through and I say let's see. I was never late on this account.
You can go in and add an additional explanation as to why you believe that this was an inaccuracy and take action.
Now we also need to talk about collections. Collections hold back a lot of people's credit scores in paying for a collection. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but paying a collection often will lower your credit score. I know it seems like if you pay off a collection, that's a good thing and it's going to increase your score. It just doesn't work like that, unfortunately.
What ends up happening is when you pay off a collection it reactivates or updates the date of last activity on the collection account and can decrease your credit score.
So usually what's better is to negotiate rather than pay off collections. And this would be something like paying for a deletion of the account or of that trade line.
You would ask the creditor to you know, you might pay an amount either that's settled or the full amount for them to delete that off your report. It's not something they're required to do, but it's something that you can take a look at doing.
I don't suggest touching collections unless you talk with a licensed credit repair company to be able to help you handle those because they have internal teams and attorneys who actually can handle this and have experience handling this well because it can be dangerous to touch collections just paying them off because it very likely will decrease your credit score.
With that being said, there are a lot of people who can still buy a home even with collections. As your collections get older and older, they have less impact on your credit score. So if you have a collection that's new, it's probably gonna be difficult for you to purchase a home. But if you have a collection that was a couple of years ago, as time goes on, that's going to have less impact on your credit score and make it easier for you to purchase a home.
So on this day, what I want you to do is, you know, we went through earlier and took a look at what errors, what negative items are on your credit report. This is the day that I want you to take action on those negative items, right? I'm gonna have that dispute letter in the description that way you can take a look at that.
You can also take a look at addressing errors on your credit report with something like ScoreMaster or other similar tools.
This is still included in the payment history. This is gonna impact 35% of your score. Again, what I want you to do is set up Auto Pay. Because if you had late payments in the past, I wanna make sure that you never have late payments in the future because they can be so damaging to your credit score.
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Never want you to miss a payment because it just drops your score so much. So, what you can do is set up autopay either through the website wherever your loan is through.
Or if there's not an option for that most banks will have some sort of system where they'll send an auto check every single month to whatever address you want it to go to.
So what I want you to do is take a look at setting up auto-pay for things like utilities, student loans cars, auto payments, and things like that to make sure that you're always on time because it makes up so much of your credit score. So we addressed those. Anything that happened in the past, we wanna make sure we get those off the credit report if possible, and then also make sure that those never happen again moving forward.
Because if we address all the late payments that happened in the past, if you have another late payment, it's just going to start the cycle all over again.
Also, even if you pay off your credit card every single month, It's a good idea to make sure that you have autopay set up for the minimum credit card payment if you can still go into your credit card app and pay the full balance if you want to every month, which is great to help you not pay any interest on that.
But just make sure at minimum you're making those minimum credit card payments to make sure that a late payment never happens. On your credit card, just making sure that your payment history is cleaned up from the past and also set up well, to not have a late payment in the future is really gonna make sure that your credit score stays really in clean shape because it makes up so much, such a large percentage of your credit score.
We wanna take a look at lowering the utilization of your accounts. This is going to impact your score by 30%. Also, a really huge way that we can move the credit score is by addressing the utilization that you have. So think about utilization as how much credit you have available to use.
So you've probably heard of people who've maxed out credit cards, and maybe that's something you've done yourself. That's okay. Again, doesn't make you a bad person. But maybe it's just a habit that we need to look at changing and moving, you know, moving forward.
So, that's why maxing out a credit card is so detrimental to your credit score because it's all about the utilization. It's how much credit are you using versus how much is available to you.
So for instance, let's say you have a credit card and it has a credit limit of $5,000. Now, let's say you put a balance of $3,000 on it, you're utilizing 60% of that credit card. We just take 3,000 divided by 5,000. So the balance divided by the credit limit shows us what percentage of that are we utilizing. So 60% is gonna be in that higher range where it's going to decrease your score.
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So there are two solutions to this lower our utilization, because the lower the utilization, the better it is for your credit score. Number one is we can decrease the balance.
You can pay off the balance either in a lump sum or maybe monthly. You start adding how much from your budget you have, and you start chipping away at the balance on installment loans or credit cards. Things like that.
The other option that's really quick and easy to do is increasing your credit limit. So for instance, maybe I go to wherever this credit card is and I say, Hey, could I have a credit limit increase? There's usually an option to do that on the website. And if they approve me for that increase, let's say even by a thousand dollars, we'll drop my utilization from 60% to 50% just by getting an increase in the credit limit.
So what I would suggest is spending this day going through all of your accounts, all your credit card accounts, and seeing if could you get a credit limit increase. That way we can just lower our utilization extremely quickly. Also in the future, if you ever need to add a higher balance onto it, it has less impact on your score.
So I really want you to spend time going through your accounts and trying to increase that credit limit. And it may take a couple of days for those credit card companies to get back to you on whether they're going to increase your limit or not. There's no harm in trying, there's no penalty if they come back and say, Hey, we're not gonna increase the limit. It doesn't have any impact on your credit score. This is kind of the impact that utilization has on your score.
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So anywhere from one, actually let's start down here at the bottom of the chart, from 30% to 49% utilization. Think of that similarly to like, a C on your report card it's average, it's gonna be fine, but it's not great.
Anywhere from 10% to 29%, think of it like a B on a report card, 0%. This is gonna sound strange. More like an A minus. It's still great. Like no one's gonna come home with an A-minus and be upset about it. Well, maybe some people. But it's not the best, surprisingly. We talked about credit being a game.
If you use zero credit at all it can be difficult to maintain a high credit score. So a utilization from 1% to 9% is really going to get you the best score. Now, please keep in mind that a plus and a minus, it's not going to make a huge difference. If you're somebody who wants to have the best credit score possible and you want to brag about it to your friends, then you're probably going wanna stick to a utilization at 1% - 9%.
Now keep in mind, I also said earlier that a good credit score does not cost a diamond interest. Just because you utilize your card doesn't mean that you pay interest on the card. The reporting date and the payment date on credit cards are different. You can still report on your credit report can report that you had a balance without paying interest if you paid off every single month. So I'm not saying that you have to pay interest to get a good credit score. You do not have to pay interest to maintain a good credit score.
This is what I do with my credit cards. I have several credit cards that I use and I interchange frequently so I can put a balance on them, have activity on them, and utilization on them, but I pay them off every single month.
If budgeting is maybe something that you need some more restraint or some guidelines on what can be helpful, if you have a couple of credit cards designating them to do specific jobs, maybe you have one card that's for groceries, one card that's for gas, and one card that's for discretionary spending. And you choose to pay that off every single month. But since they report a balance on them, it helps you stay within this A-plus utilization range.
So to simplify this, a good target is to keep your balances less than 50% utilization. So you can go through, and look at all of your balances. Through whatever you're going to use to take a look at your credit report, whether it's AnnualCreditReport.com, you're gonna use your credit card company, you're gonna use ScoreMaster, or whatever you choose to use. Look at what your utilization is, take your balance, and divide it by the credit limit. Again, we want that to be the first target is under 50%.
Once you're there, the next target we wanna move to is less than 30%. After you get to that point, the next target is less than 10%. Each one of these brackets that you get to, it's going to have a higher increase in your credit score. So if you're at 60%, by getting to 50%, we're gonna see a slight boost in the credit score. Once we get to 30%, we're gonna see another boost in the credit score.
When we get to less than 10%, we're gonna see another boost in the credit score. So you can see just by our payment history and looking at utilization, those have huge impacts on your credit score.
Next, we wanna take a look at credit length. So how long you've had credit is going to impact your score by about 15%. Now, the options here are kind of limited. You know, you can't just wave a magic wand and you become older and you have a longer average age of credit history. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way.
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But there are a couple of things that we could take a look at here. So if you are younger, I really would suggest starting now. Take a look at starting to get maybe a couple of credit cards and use them, like I mentioned, assign them certain jobs and then pay them off every single month. Just by doing that, if you don't have any credit history, to begin with, that is going to be a tremendous way for you to get an excellent credit score, and it's super easy to maintain costs, $0 in interest to be able to do that.
What you might need to do if you've never had any credit is get a secured credit card. That's the easiest way to start. And a secured credit card is where you pay money upfront, so maybe $200. And the creditor will hold that money and then they basically give you a credit card against that money.
So it's that $200 you can get back if the credit card, you know, whenever you choose to close that if you do choose to close it. But basically, they have kind of almost like a security deposit if you don't end up paying back that card.
Now, there is an option to get a loan if you do have thin credit. Thin credit is where you don't have a ton of credit history. FHA loans are usually gonna be most lenient here. And then also you can look at adding a co-borrower if that's an option with a strong credit history to add that onto your loan. Because it can be difficult if you're younger and don't have a lot of history with credit to get approved for a mortgage.
Something you can do here is look into adding an authorized user. And this is somebody who pays on time on a credit card. So maybe you have a spouse, a partner maybe a family member who has a credit card and they pay it on time. They've been doing that consistently for years.
If they add you as an authorized user that can help increase the average length of age of your credit history and also add a really positive trade line to your credit report, That can help out just a little bit. Keep in mind, you know, it's not gonna be earth-shattering. This credit length impacts your score by 15%.
score by 10%. Thus, there are two main types of credit. There's installment and revolving. So all this is really saying here is that if you have a wide range of types of credit then it can have a positive impact on your score.
If you only have, let's say, credit cards on your credit report, it's not the end of the world. But it's probably gonna keep you from getting to the top credit score. I'm talking like eight hundred. You can still have, you know, a 700 credit score by just having credit cards. But if you want that top, top credit score, you're going to want to have a mix of different types of credit.
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So for instance, installment accounts. Installment accounts are where you purchase something with a balance and you pay the balance down to zero. A revolving account is where you have a limit. You add a balance to it and then you pay it down over time. But you can still continue to add a balance. So that's like a credit card.
So an installment would be something like you purchased furniture and you paid it, and you had a balance. You pay it down to zero.
Now what I don't want you to do is I don't want you to open a new account just to get credit. I see some people will go out and purchase things on a payment plan just to like, they'll go purchase something they don't need just to build credit. Please don't do that. You do not need to do that.
What you can do though is consider small installment accounts if it's something that you're already purchasing. So, for example, a few months ago I purchased a couch and I was gonna pay for it in cash. And they were like, Hey, you put it on our payment plan then it's going to be, we'll take 10% off. So I was like, cool. I put it on the payment plan, got 10% off, got to add an installment account to my credit report, and then I paid it off the next month.
So, I did all that just to save the 10% and to add an installment account to my credit report. And it had a positive impact on my credit report. Again, don't go purchase stuff. You don't need it just to change your credit score. What I did had probably a very small impact on my credit score. Again, it's that 10%-ish range. But in the long run, it's something that can be helpful.
Now on your revolving accounts. This is something like a regular credit card, and again, we talked about kind of assigning jobs to those different credit cards. One for groceries, gas, discretionary spending maybe eating out depending on how many cards you want to use. I really only rotate between two cards. My credit score is in the mid-seven hundred. I don't think you need to go out and try to be the credit score God and get all the way, you know, as high as you possibly can, but it's something you can do if you want to.
But keep in mind when we talk about using credit cards, the best way to use them is if you're paying them off every single month to maintain a high credit score. If you're in the spot where you have credit cards and they have really high utilizations, don't go and start using credit cards. We wanna start working on paying those down below 10% before you start using them for different purposes like that.
Also if you're having difficulty getting approved for a credit card, take a look at a secured card that's probably gonna be the best. You can look at a local bank or credit union. Those usually have good options with secured credit cards.
Day Nine is we're looking at new credit what a lot of people know as inquiries. This is gonna impact your score by 10%.
So inquiries often are known as hard credit pulls. There are also soft ones. Soft credit pulls don't impact your score. Hard credit pulls do impact your score. Usually, a hard credit pull is needed if you're going to get a loan, so something like a mortgage or an auto loan. Soft credit pulls are normally when you're just monitoring your credit score.
Now, inquiries have little impact on your score, but you can dispute them if they are inaccurate. If they're not inaccurate, you're not gonna have a bit of luck disputing them because the creditor will have evidence that you authorized the dispute.
So they do have minimum impact and an inquiry usually it's going to affect your score, zero to five points. This is based on Experian data. So it's not going to be earth-shattering. I think people sometimes think an inquiry is going to tank their credit, and that's just not the case.
For instance, when shopping for a mortgage you actually have 45 days to get multiple inquiries and they'll only impact your score as if it was just one inquiry. All the other inquiries will still show up on your credit report, but it will only have the impact of one. Same thing for auto loans. I don't know the exact time window for auto loans, but I know auto loans also have a shopping grace period.
I believe it's around 14-ish days. So fact-check me on that one before you go and do that. But you are able to shop, and get multiple inquiries and they will only impact as one within a certain timeframe. So don't think that you know, if I get multiple inquiries for something like a mortgage, that every single one's gonna chip away at your credit report or your credit score, because it will not do that.
Now, Day Ten, after all this work, I wanna make sure that you are able to spot any errors in the future or any problems, any identity theft that comes up after you did all this work. And you need to do that through credit monitoring.
So there are so many options that you can do with credit monitoring. Your credit card provider most likely is going to have options for credit monitoring. There's also gonna be sites like Credit Karma and you can also use things like Score Master for credit monitoring.
So the goal here really is to spot credit errors as soon as they happen so you can address them as quickly as possible. Also to spot identity theft, a growing problem that's happening and keeping a lot of people's scores down.
You also wanna see the momentum of your score as you work on your credit. You wanna see, okay, great, as I lowered my utilization, my score has gone up. Seeing that positive feedback as you're working on your credit can really help you stay encouraged as you're going through the difficult process of building your credit score.
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