To get a good credit score the first tip is to pay your bills on time. It does not matter how bad your credit history is you must pay all your bills on time. This will help build a positive payment history on your credit report. This is the second most important factor when calculating your credit score.
It also matters how much time has passed between derogatory items on your credit report and when your score is calculated. After an amount of time, allegedly four years, negative items on your credit are not weighed as heavily. Thus it is very important for you to build a positive payment history.
The next tip is to remove any inaccurate information. Unfortunately our credit reporting system has many flaws. Often a divorce will result in bad credit. The divorce judge will divide the debts between both parties. Then if one of the parties defaults on a loan, even though they were court ordered to pay, it will be reported on both parties credit.
You can also have bad credit due to a lender mistake. It happens all the time, where the amount due changes and due to a mistake on the lenders side you are never notified and keep making your regular payments. Yet the whole time your credit is being ruined with derogatory marks.
You can also have a negative mark due to stolen identity, or just a credit reporting error. These are very common, where someone somewhere makes a mistake but your credit pays the price.
These are all inaccurate marks on your credit report. You should dispute and remove all of these marks.
Congress passed legislation to protect people just like you that find themselves in this situation. The Fair Credit Reporting Act says that inaccurate information must be removed.
To dispute an inaccurate mark you can hire a credit repair service. They will draft a dispute letter and send it to each credit bureau that is reporting the inaccurate listing. Or you can do this compose a letter yourself, however you should know that credit bureaus often do not conduct investigations based on one dispute letter.
