Wednesday, 4 November 2009

So You Want To Increase Your Credit Score ?

By Trevor Weir

At some time in your life you will walk into a bank and apply for a loan or mortgage of some kind. If you live in the western world, the bank will invariably check a central credit agency in order to validate your ability to make payments on the loan that you are applying for. Your banker will tell you to relax, this is painless, as he/she reviews your credit score from the central agency. This will be the time when that critical purchase of a home or new car will cause you to silently say, Darn, I wish I knew how to increase my credit score. We have all been there and done that - some of us more times than we can count.

Still yet others mentioned tricks such as constantly querying the credit bureau and challenging them to respond to you within a period of time mandated by law. Truthfully, enough people mentioned the latter, that it appears that this somewhat underhand method has some validity in some jurisdictions.

As mentioned above, most people simply answered "pay your bills on time and your credit rating will be excellent". We counter that paying your bills on time is fact expected and that this can give you an average credit rating of 5-700. But is this "pay your bills" thought really true? We are going to name this as myth number 1 and look more closely at it here. Loan institutions absolutely adore customers whom pay off their bills on time every month? We calculate stupendous bank profits in that model, right? The truth is, loan institutions and other lenders including the mafia are in absolute love with people who maintain a nice healthy balance that they can get charged interest on.

Ok, myth-ism number 2. Banks and Loan Sharks love people who borrow as much as possible. Really? If this were the case, people who couldn't repay loans would get huge amounts of credit and constantly end up in repayment problems. Do I hear echoes of a well known mortgage problem in here? So perhaps this isn't 100% of the answer either.

Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between. Loan institutions love clients who pay something on their bills each month ( preferably just the interest and a little more ) and whom appear to have the ongoing ability to manage/to pay down on the debt load. I.e. Fifty thousand in available personal credit, 22,000 used already.

The key phrase here being "ongoing ability " and "debt ratio". Ongoing ability is why some older retired persons with otherwise good credit may sometimes have difficulty refinancing longer term loans. They are looked at as not having jobs per se and therefore while their credit may be good the ongoing ability (income) aspect might be perceived as being weak.

So from what we have seen here, the best Candidate is not just someone who has no defaults on their credit rating, such a person may get to 650 on the credit score but may not be able to get a credit score of 800 or more. It is expected that most people who have been working on improving their credit scores will have few defaults though not many. So the key issue for those looking to increase their credit scores from 600 to 800 leans more towards something else.

The absolute best candidate is someone with a favorable credit to debt ratio, meaning they have room to increase their debt, and has shown the long term ability to handle an ongoing balance. Note that balance does not mean not necessarily paying it off every month.

Who then are the loan arrangers really searching for? That would be the gentle person with a credit to debt ratio which is not only low, meaning they have room to increase it, but someone who also has shown the long term ability to handle an ongoing balance. Come to the site and view the Credit Score Video then make a few quick changes to fix your score. Is 72 hours too long?

About the Author:

No comments:

Post a Comment