How To Afford the Credit Score You Want

So you want to improve your credit score, but you don’t have the money to pay down your credit cards in the next month. Don’t worry—none of us do. There are ways to improve credit score beyond what’s plaguing you now. Check out this post for a few tips on getting back your credit, your paycheck, and your financial freedom.

The first step is getting rid of negative information on your credit report. Believe it or not, many people with credit problems have erroneous information on their credit reports. And your credit report isn’t inaccessible—you can buy a copy of it (sorry, but it’s not too expensive) from each of the three major credit bureaus in the United States and take a look for yourself or order one free copy a year. You can run into lots of things, from accounts that don’t belong to you to charges that were paid ages ago. Negative info can stay on your credit report anywhere from three to seven years—talk about seven years’ bad luck!

At this point you’ve got two options: you can take matters into your own hands and dispute the wrong points on your credit report, or you can hire an attorney. Before you hit the brakes too hard, you need to know two things about the word “attorney”: 1) it’s not as expensive as you’re thinking, especially for this kind of stuff, and 2) having an attorney makes the process infinitely simpler for you. Paying for an attorney when you have credit problems? Yes. The right attorney will get your problems solved much sooner than you could on your own (if you’re the average American with a 9 – 5 who probably didn’t study credit, taxes, or litigation in law school). It’s worth it.

The next step isn’t easy, but it’s doable. You don’t have to pay off your credit cards—but you need to do what you can to pay down each card to somewhere below 50%. There may be some belt-cinching here, but some things just need to be done to rebuild credit. I’m not going to pretend to know what your financial situation is; I have lots of advice on to pinch pennies here and scrape by there. I’m sure you’ve heard lots of it before. The point is, if you want your credit and your finances to change, then you might have to make some changes. Don’t worry—change isn’t scary at all. And when you’ve regained your credit score through eliminating negative information from your credit score and paying down some of the credit cards, you’ll never regret having gotten out from underneath that burden.