How Fast Can You Fix Your Credit?

Your credit rating is dynamic, changing as you use your credit cards, get loans and make or neglect payments on your accounts. Your rating gets bad rapidly if you spend too much of your credit limit or stop paying your bills responsibly. It takes longer to repair damage because creditors want to see lengthy good records, but positive actions are quickly reflected on your credit reports. You can often make significant progress within a month.

Revolving Account Balances

High revolving account balances give you a quick fix opportunity because your credit score goes up if you pay down a big amount. You should never spend more than 10 to 30 percent of your credit card limits if you want an optimal score, according to MSN Money columnist Liz Pulliam Weston. Your Experian, Equifax and TransUnion credit reports will reflect big payoffs within 30 days, quickly improving your appeal to creditors.

Credit Report Mistakes

Your credit reports may be among the 80 percent that have mistaken information, according to Bankrate.com. Errors in negative information can be fixed within 30 days under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Get free reports from AnnualCreditReport.com, which hands out yearly copies to consumers on request. Find mistakes, submit online complaints through the credit bureau websites and wait for the results. The bureaus get a month to confirm or remove the data, and they alert you to the results and provide amended report copies at the end of their investigations. Look beyond obvious errors like current accounts reported as delinquent to things like under-reported credit limits, which hurt you by throwing off the difference between your balances and available credit.

Payment Dates

Your payment dates are vitally important to your credit score because they make up 35 percent of that number, according to the MyFICO credit-scoring company. You cannot immediately undo the damage from late payments, but catching up all your accounts is a good start. Their current status is reflected within 30 days and updated monthly as you continue to make on-time payments. Creditors see the old past-due information, but they also see a growing string of positive activity.

Warning

Ignore ads promising to fix your credit immediately, as the Federal Trade Commission warns that they are fraudulent. Credit repairers have no secret methods to erase bad credit bureau records. They can only file disputes using the same process you can do on your own. While they may help your credit within a month by getting rid of mistakes, they charge high fees to do what you can accomplish yourself at no cost. Some demand payment up front, which is illegal, then do nothing at all. Fix your credit on your own through disputes and building up positive records.