How to achieve great credit

Question

Chris Mason · Answer

Simple things:

• Get added as an authorized user on someone's credit card that knows, loves, and trusts you, that has had the credit card for a while. You will often inherit that card's history.
• With your baby starter card, buy your wife something modest but nice once a month, pay the full balance of the CC off once it comes. She is also to buy you something nice once a month on her card.

Logan Hicks · Answer

Secured credit card, Secured Credit Loans, Go buy a car, pay it off rapidly (1 year), buy another, pay it off too.

Pay all your currently existing loans to down to at least 50% of origination balance, pay all credit cards down to 30% or less, preferrably 10% or less.

Dont bother being added as an authorized user to a card unless you find out whether they share credit or not. Some banks like M&T dont.

Get secured cards through providers that allow you to increase your balance above the 5k mark, the 12k mark, and the 25k mark. Those are the three major point jumps you will experience. ANything less isnt worth your time.In my personal experience, Navy Federal is the best to go through for all three of these.They also do loans for houses, as low as 10k from last I asked, which was less than 2 months ago.

Jeff S. · Answer

Also, do not close any credit accounts.  The average age of your credit accounts is used - older is better.

Definitely check out credit karma. dot com.

Account Closed · Answer

Sign up for a credit monitoring service! Believe it or not but there are incorrect items on more credit reports than not. It's actually quite a messy system. The monitoring service will help you see if there are currently items on your credit profile that aren't yours as well as make sure none are added incorrectly as you build your credit. All that has been mentioned is fairly sound advice.

Also, find out when your creditor reports the balance of your credit cards. Always reporting a $0 balance will not help your credit. Creditors want to see activity since they mainly make money when they charge you interest.

Jake Hartnett · Answer

Obviously pay your balance every month.

Never close an account.

Different types of credit (like car loan, mortgage) will help. Be careful here. Don't spend money you wouldn't have spent anyway. It could cost you thousands of dollars to raise your score 100 pts a few months faster.

New credit sources will temporarily lower your score, so plan when you want to get that mortgage and don't open any new accounts for a few months before.

Make sure you never use more than 10% of your limit. You want to always use your card but never seem like you need it. When I started with a secured card it was only a $200 limit, so I set up a $5/month donation to a charity and set up auto pay so I never had to think about it, and never even carried the card. After about a year I was flooded with offers from the major card companies.

Good Luck.

How to achieve great credit

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