i just wanted to stop by and give you some really quick credit improvement
tips that you can take today to improve your credit score so let's jump right in
tip number one is you always want to pull your credit and know what's on there don't assume that
everything that's on your credit report is accurate because most times it's not i can
tell you as someone that has been a victim of identity theft that people will put fraudulent
accounts in your name um there are always you know the possibility of there being some sort of
name mix up where your name is connected to a family member's name or your name is connected
to you know a company or an account that you've never heard of so if you pull your report and you
see anything that looks the least bit suspicious you want to dispute that and let me tell you it
is your right to dispute anything that you see on your credit report that you question you can
dispute anything from as simple as your name in the way that it's reported and your mailing
address because those things can be incorrect as well but more importantly you can dispute any sort
of account whether it is a collections account it could be a credit card account it could be a
student loan account any account that is on your credit history that doesn't look right to you you
have the right as a consumer a guaranteed right to be able to dispute that most people think that
disputing credit is something that is a lengthy process or is something that you have to have um
an attorney do for you or something that you have to pay someone to do
disputing your credit is very simple it's super easy there are three different ways that you can
dispute a negative or you know incorrect item on your credit the first way is to
do it online there are pros and cons of doing it online of course doing it online is super quick
however when you dispute something online you're sending it through an automated system
which means that your dispute is essentially going to be read by a computer and it's going to be sent
to the company that um the account originated from and they're basically going to be sending them
just a digital message saying hey is this account correct does this account belong to this person
and it's one or two clicks for the company to say yep that's right they don't have to
do any research or anything like that so if you do it online sometimes you'll get lucky
and those items are instantly corrected you know especially if it's an item that doesn't belong
on your credit report but a lot of times those accounts will quickly come back the next day
as validated which means that it stays on your credit report until you can provide some other
reasoning for why that item should be removed so i will tell you um that i
recently had um there was a collection item from a healthcare visit that i had for like a lab test
that my insurance company was supposed to pay for and for whatever reason they didn't pay it
so it went on my credit and i filled out the online form just to see what would happen and
i filled it out and said that this was supposed to be covered by the health insurance company and
i put down that company's information and within about maybe 48 hours it was just a couple of days
um i got an email from you know the credit bureaus saying this account has been deleted
from your credit report and i'm a person that has really really good credit so i never really um
you know worry about like whether or not i can get something deleted like i'm kind of like a
master at getting things deleted from my credit so that was just it was you know just like a blimp
on my credit and um because my score is so high it didn't significantly drop my credit score
i think my credit at the time was like um at 8 15 like the average number was 8 15 and that account
being placed on my report you know it dropped it down a few points um that's because i have so
many other positive accounts that kind of like outweighed it um but going back to the dispute
process you can do it online chances are it's going to come back validated the other way is
you can do it over the phone um if you dispute it over the phone you can actually call experian
transunion or equifax and you can tell them why something on your credit report doesn't look right
um there is you know nothing wrong with calling you know it's just an old school way but
uh usually sometimes there can be a long waiting time um sometimes the person on the phone may
just put down you know a default reason for why you're disputing something it may not correctly
indicate why you're disputing it and so that can sometimes slow you down um but i'll definitely put
the information the information is below on how you can call write to or um do an online dispute
so the third way that you dispute something is by mail this for me and i think any other credit
person or you know credit specialist or anything like that will tell you that mailing in your
dispute is the most effective way and i'll tell you why when you mail in a letter especially a
letter that you have written in an ink color other than black when you mail in that letter that means
a human being actually has to read that letter that is a letter that they cannot send through
the e oscar system which is just their little system that they feed into the computer that
tries to read out what your dispute says and um is what they use to try to validate your debt
but if you write a handwritten letter let's say in blue ink it makes it harder for the system to read
which forces an actual human being to have to take time out to physically sit down and read
your letter and then for them to go through all of the steps to try to validate that debt
so mailing in those letters is always the most effective way to get something deleted
from your credit report you want to make sure that when you mail in those letters you get
um the return like you get the postage that gives you the little slip that shows when it
got delivered delivered so you want to make sure that you use like tracked mailing just as proof
that you did send in the dispute so for me there have been times where i have disputed things
on my credit um i sent in a letter and 30 days later five accounts had been deleted you know um
and for legitimate reasons um but you know mailing is always going to be
the most reliable way for you to dispute something um having that paper trail
forcing people to do manual labor like read your letter there's going to be a lot of lazy people
that work for the credit bureaus that will say i don't feel like reading another piece of mail
you know there are people that have to read that stuff all day long and some people will just say
screw it delete it off your account i don't feel like reading this and that's a lot of times how
stuff gets deleted people don't you know when they have to read that snail mail they don't feel like
putting a ton of time into you know trying to validate those accounts so that's a quick tip for
you guys um the next tip that i have is for you to lower your credit utilization so if you have you
know credit cards or you know you have a car loan any type of loan or any type of revolving payments
that you owe money on you want to make sure that you lower that as much as you can if you for
example owe ten thousand dollars in credit card debt let's just say that you pay half of it off
um and that was your full credit line well you just reduced your credit to debt ratio by 50
you will see a significant jump in your credit score whenever you pay down
your loans or any type of debt that is revolving debt so you always want to as much as you can
whether it means doubling up payments you know do whatever you can to pay that stuff
down because that's going to pay it's going to definitely help you raise your credit score
the next tip that i have is something that i did and i did it often with my american express cards
and with my visa cards um i would always ask for the credit card companies to raise my credit
limit now some people may confuse this with like you having your credit pulled for a new account
when i say ask for them to raise your credit limit this is for an existing credit card that you have
the reason why this essentially raises your credit is because you are now increasing the
amount of credit that you have um and as long as you keep the amount of debt revolving debt
if you keep that number low in comparison to the amount of available credit that you have
that is going to play a big part in you raising your credit score so if you have a credit line
that's worth ten thousand dollars and you only use a hundred dollars a month of credit you're
going to have a very well a much higher credit score because you're not using the debt that you
you know have linked to that account you're not using the credit excuse me so always ask your
credit card companies to raise your credit limit it doesn't affect your credit for them to just
raise the limit but be wary that when you increase your credit limit you don't need to increase your
spending because if you increase your spending it's still going to have a negative sort of credit
to debt ratio reporting so you want to make sure that you reduce your credit spending or your loan
debt while you're increasing the amount of credit that you have available for an account so you guys
let me know if so far that makes sense um you know let me know in the comments i'll
definitely clarify it um one thing i do want to throw in about your dispute letters that i didn't
mention a minute ago is you want to make sure that you list out the account name um list out your
information place your social security number on it your date of birth all of that needs to go in
your dispute letter whenever you're sending it by mail which again i said was the most effective way
i do have templates for that um because sometimes i know we get busy or you know sometimes get lazy
we don't want to write out an actual letter i do have downloadable templates that you guys can get
either in my actual credit course or i just have the templates available for download if
you just wanted to purchase those by themselves but however you do it is totally up to you
so the next tip that we have for raising your credit score instantly now this is going to be
something that you want to be very careful about in order to raise your credit score instantly you
can become an authorized user on someone else's credit account now the benefit of this is simply
let's say you've got an uncle that has superb credit history when it comes to
paying off his credit cards or you know the monthly payments for his american express account
well if he has like a 50 000 credit limit and he never uses you know more than 50 bucks a
month he's got this super high credit um line available to him right so you can become an
authorized user on that account now i've added family members to my personal credit card accounts
and by the way when i say my credit card accounts i don't use credit cards i leave the accounts open
because it gives me a longer credit history but i never use those accounts um every few months i may
use my card to just buy you know something like a piece of candy or something um but other than that
i never use like credit cards because i don't believe in carrying over debt month to month
so when i added my family members to my credit account and made them authorized users some of
them saw a 100 point increase and that was because they inherited two different things from me they
inherited the long credit account history from me for that particular card i think i had it open for
eight years or so i mean it's still open today so they got eight years of um an account history
and then they also got the impeccable payment history and they also got you know their
credit utilization rate um is low because there's no credit being used on the account
but their credit limit is high so they got the perfect account history for me and they got the
high credit limit um and when i did this for one of my family members you know it raised their
score literally a hundred points um you want to be weary when you do that or when you ask someone
to be an authorized user simply because if they have bad payment history then you inherit the bad
history as well so you want to make sure that if you do ask someone to place you on their
account as an authorized user that it's a person that you know has really great credit history i
would like personally ask them if i could see their credit report that's just me but you know
that's just how i do it so that is definitely a way to instantly boost your credit score it works
my family members will tell you that because they still thank me for it today so pretty much
the last thing i want to leave you with as far as like raising your credit score um
this one is a little different um because it involves when you get your credit pulled by
a company when you're applying for a loan or you know when you are trying to purchase a car
or anything like that um please know that those sorts of loan applications are called credit
inquiries and every time someone pulls your credit your credit score decreases by three
to five points so if you want your credit score to increase then please stop applying for credit
trust me if you got denied for one credit card you're probably going to get denied for another
credit card based on whatever reasoning you know you were denied whether it was because you don't
have enough credit or because you have too many collection accounts usually if one denies you
someone else will deny you as well now if you're trying to just build credit it's always a good
idea to open a secured credit account um getting a secured credit card you can get this from any bank
wells fargo bank america they all have them you can get a secure credit card account which
basically requires you to pay a deposit in order to open that credit card account after a year of
making on-time payments and having good history they will give you your deposit back and they
usually will convert the account to an unsecured account so you know always think
about when you're applying for any type of credit think about if you really really need to apply
for that because applying for it does hurt your credit score so an easy way to raise your score
is to simply to stop applying for credit um there was a friend of mine and i won't say their name
but they once told me that they thought that they could boost their credit score because
they were constantly like applying for credit cards and applying for cards and
they were constantly getting turned down they said well i thought the way to build my credit
was to keep applying for credit and that was just a very sad day when i burst that person's
bubble and said no that is not how credit works so if you guys have any other questions about
how credit works um anything that you need me to clarify definitely drop me a comment below um
i do like to you know look out for our military friends you know if you're in the military if
you've served i definitely want to help you out definitely want to answer any questions
that i can about how you can improve your credit i can get you information about va loans fha loans
also housing grants that's definitely a topic that you know i can speak to and so anything
that you guys ever want to hear please you know let me know in the comments i'm always happy
to make another video about anything and again if you guys just want to make your life easier
and just like buy the dispute 609 letter that's what they're called the 609 um templates for
dispute and credit um i can definitely make those available to you guys just check the link below
other than that i'll see you guys in the next video don't forget to like and subscribe
and let me let me know what you guys think of this video i'm always looking for you
know ways to improve so that's all i have for you guys deuces