If you’ve ever wondered if there’s a surefire way to build your credit, the answer is… yes! There are many ways to build up your credit, but if you’ve been looking for a credit building hack or a way to build credit fast, then you’ve come to the right place.
Read on to learn about the best ways to build your credit quickly and see your credit score rise to unforeseen heights.
What Is Your Credit Score?
Your credit score is a number assigned to you by credit bureaus that reflects your creditworthiness, or how trustworthy you are with repaying your debts. That credit score number changes as your creditworthiness shifts, or as you pay off your cards and debts responsibly (no not!).
Your credit score can stretch between 300 and 850, and the higher the number is, the better. If you have a higher number, lenders will consider you to be a more trustworthy individual, and you’ll probably attract more lenders, with better terms, and even lower interest rates.
Several elements determine how high (or low) your credit score is, including how many accounts you have open, how far behind you are on paying your bills, how many late payments you have, and other factors. Basically, if you pay back your loans and credit cards on time, according to your agreed schedule, you’ll have a higher credit score.
If you ever want to buy a car or a house, your credit score will play a very large role. A healthy credit score can open lots of doors, from more lending options to lower interest rates to easier qualifying for apartment rentals.
If you’re struggling with a low credit score, read on to learn about five solutions to increase your score.
How to Build Credit Fast
1. Always Make Payments on Time
Several things can negatively impact your credit score. One of the biggest factors is how often you manage to make on-time payments. If you have a credit card, a mortgage, or a lease on a car, making payments on time can go a long way towards guaranteeing that you will have a higher credit score.
Your score can take a hit whenever you miss a payment, so make sure that you have your due dates scheduled. Another way to ensure that you will make your payments on time is to set up autopay (more on that later).
2. Make Multiple Payments Per Billing Cycle
This might seem somewhat out of left field, but if you make multiple payments within each billing cycle, you’ll be able to increase your credit score. Credit bureaus see this as responsible behavior and reward you with a score increase. It’s also a smart way to pay down your balances faster.
The faster you pay down your balance, the better your utilization ratio. (More on this later too.) When you make multiple payments within a single billing cycle, you will naturally end up paying more than the minimum due.
3. Set Up Autopay
Autopay is a great way to save your bacon and keep your credit score as high as possible. When it comes to building your credit fast, there’s nothing more debilitating than missing one—or multiple—payments on your credit cards. When you set up autopay, you won’t have to worry about getting your payments in on time.
Autopay is a feature that most banks and lending services offer and they usually make it easy to set up. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be able to automatically pay off part of, all of, or just the minimum due each billing period. That amount will then be automatically paid on or before your due date. In some cases, you can also decide for the payment to go out on a specific date, prior to your due date.
Most banks and lending services will allow you to set up autopay online, but if you have any questions or uncertainty, don’t hesitate to call your lender and have them help you set it up.
4. Watch Your Credit Utilization
Another large factor for building credit fast is keeping track of your credit utilization rate. This rate is made up of the revolving credit you are using divided by the total amount of credit that you have access to.
For example, let’s say you happen to have $20,000 in credit that is available to you across two separate credit cards. Then, let’s say that you’ve not used one card, but you’ve used $10,000 on the other card—in this scenario, you’ll have a credit utilization rate of 50%. To look at it another way, you’re utilizing 50% of your entire credit amount.
Along with paying making payments on time, keeping your utilization low is a primary factor credit bureaus look at every month. Most experts advise keeping your utilization rate below 30%. That means never using more than 30% of all the credit available to you at any given time.
5. Keep Your Cards Open
Another factor credit bureaus look at is the amount of time you’ve had credit lines open. The longer you’ve had a credit card (and the longer you’ve managed it responsibly), the better it looks to credit bureaus.
It’s not as important as on-time payments or utilization rates, but keeping your cards and credit lines open can increase your credit score.
Conclusion
If you want to build credit fast, it’s of paramount importance that you understand what credit bureaus are looking for. From there, you can take steps to make sure that your credit score is as high as it can be, and you can avoid common issues that would leave you with a lower credit score.
Use these hacks to your advantage and watch your credit score go up!
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