To those of you who haven't been following this series, this is the sixth in a series on how to repair your or a
client's credit. It's not intended as any kind of scam on the credit bureaus, but rather a realistic method of dealing with negative credit that will put a prospective home buyer back into a position where their credit is good enough to buy a home. If you are interested, please feel free to click on the links to read the articles in order: Credit repair 1, Credit Repair 2, Credit Repair 3, Credit Repair 4 and Credit Repair 5 .
In this post we are going to cover what you need to be concerned with regarding the rest of the trade lines that are on your credit report. As mentioned in the other posts, the exact criteria that is used to judge you in giving you a credit score is "proprietary" information. That is, the credit bureaus won't tell you exactly what goes in to figuring your credit score.
I personally have a problem with this. My opinion is that if you are going to be judged by a set of criteria, especially in an arena that is as important as your ability to borrow, then I think that you should have the right to know exactly what that criteria is. The sad fact of the matter is that this simply isn't the case and I doubt seriously if it changes anytime soon.
This being the case, I have second guessed some things from looking at a large number of credit reports. This isn't scientific by any means, but I'm fairly confident that I'm getting close on some of the criteria.
1) Keep your balances away from your credit limits. Even if this means requesting that your credit limit be raised.
2) Limit your inquiries into your credit. Don't allow just anybody to run your credit.
3) Limit the number of finance company accounts that you have. This includes many of the "90 days, same as cash" sorts of promotions that you see.
4) Limit the number of accounts that you have a balance on. It's better to have 2 or 3 accounts with balances on them, than 8 or 10. Just be sure that you don't go over 70% or so of the credit limit on any particular account.
Well, I hope that these posts helped. If you're in Missouri and would like my help in getting your credit cleaned up, please feel free to call me or to drop me a line.
Bob Mitchell
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