Credit Hacks You can use Now!

The other day I drove pass some signs advertising credit repair. All the credit info is free. Selling credit repair info is like selling air. It not only doesn’t make sense but its greedy too. Some aspects of improving your credit may involve spending money so the least anyone can do is give you the info for free! Don’t worry the Apex Hustler got you:

Step 1: I know, I know Know… everyone says this one and you might already be doing it but I have to say it cause its the most important step. Monitor your credit. You gotta know what’s in your credit report before you can get to work on raising your score. The legit annual report website is https://www.annualcreditreport.com. Start there, then you can continue to track your progress with any of the free credit score apps like credit karma, credit sesame, etc. These apps might have a higher score than what the bank sees when you apply for credit, but if your score is moving up on the app, you should be making progress.

Step 2: Understand what factors affect your credit score. There are five main factors that affect your credit score. Payment history accounts for 35% of your score. Payment history is your history of paying bills on time. Usually, you get a negative mark if you are more than 30 days late on a bill. Credit Utilization accounts for 30% of your score. You also want to keep this number under 30%. Credit Utilization how much of your available credit you are actually using. So if you max out your credit cards, that is 100% utilization, which is very bad. Credit history length is the average age of accounts on your report and accounts for 15% of your score. This one sucks cause it only gets better with time and goes down whenever you open a new account. Fourth, is credit mix. This is how many types of credit are on your credit report like credit cards, car loan, student loan, mortgage, etc. The more diverse the better and this makes up 10%. The fifth, major category is new credit. This is a number you wanna keep down. Applying for too much credit back to back makes you look desperate to creditors. Since when has looking desperate helped anyone get anything? This is also 10% of your score.

Step 3: Take Action! Dispute any inaccurate negative marks on your credit report. There are template letters online and you can also make disputes through some of the credit score apps. Comment below if you want me to make a post going into further detail about credit disputes. Pay your bills on time. This sounds like a no brainer but sometimes its easy to dig yourself into a deeper hole. Putting your bills on auto-pay can help prevent any further damage to your credit score. After you pay an outstanding debt, you can also ask for the negative payment history to be deleted from your credit report. Keep in mind creditors do not have to do this but there are some that are nice enough to do it. Closed mouths don’t get fed! Get your utilization down by cutting back on spending and paying down your balance. You can also ask for a credit limit increase which will lower your utilization. If you don’t have a credit card at all and can’t get approved for an unsecured card, get a secured credit card. You put down a deposit a toward the credit limit of your card. It doesn’t matter how small the limit if you keep the utilization low. Remember the purpose of this card is only to credit history. I can go on for days about credit and there will be many posts on this subject to come. If you have any specific questions, comment below. Be Apex. Top of the Food Chain.