Step One on How to Improve Your FICO score

Posted on July 20, 2008

Where to start? There are some many things that go into the FICO score calculation. If you remember from the previous post How your FICO score works, everything that goes into your FICO score is comes off your credit report. You should start by reviewing your credit reports and getting one from the three different credit bureaus.

Start by checking all your personal information on the reports. Your employer, addresses you have live at, social security number. If some doesn’t look right here you could be concerned with some kind of identity theft.

You then need to look at your accounts listed. Look for any inaccuracies like an account that you didn’t open, which is another indication of identity theft. Look for any late payments or any other negative entries.

You then need to review hard inquires for credit. Again here look for any inaccuracies. Then look at public records. This could be any bankruptcies, lawsuits, tax liens, foreclosures, and garnishments.

What to do with all this info. To improve your FICO score you need to dispute any that you think is not true listed on your report. Every report you get will come with a form to dispute errors. This you can send back to the credit bureaus and they have to do an investigation getting back to you within 30 days. Their investigation entails asking the creditor about the dispute and if the creditor doesn’t respond or can’t give thier word on the item it will be removed.

The lesson here is to know where you are at. This is really step one on how to improve a FICO score. You have to keep score to be in the game and need a starting point which this will provide. You need to follow up on errors this is something that is easy over looked by most consumers.

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