Increase Your Credit Score While Removing Delinquent Credit

Generally the biggest component of credit repair and improving a credit score is eliminating the delinquent credit accounts from your credit report.  Removing delinquent credit accounts requires written disputes to the credit reporting agency and entails patience, good execution and time.  While this process is taking place, it is prudent to work on the rest of the credit report and credit accounts to improve the credit score. 

Two approaches that can help measurably with the credit report and credit score while fixing delinquent items is to add positive data and keep all other accounts current and active.

While you working on removing the bad credit it is very helpful to improve the credit score.  This means you don’t want to let your credit report remain inactive.  The faster you begin to re-establish more credit and good credit the faster you’ll improve your credit score.

Keeping up with the current monthly payments for accounts that are in the credit report is the first step to help control a bad credit score.  Even when most credit accounts are delinquent or charged off it is important to pay the current bills on time while cleaning up delinquent accounts and adding new credit.  This action will at least prevent the credit score from deteriorating further and help it steadily rise.

One of the best places to start to build a solid credit history is to obtain a secured credit card.  A secured credit card can offer those individuals with poor credit or even no credit the opportunity to obtain credit and reestablish a payment history that will ultimately improve the credit score. 

How quickly someone can improve their credit score from past problems will be greatly dependent upon what actions are taken immediately.  The longer late payments are made, the longer the credit score will remain low and if new credit is added sooner the faster the score can start to improve. 

Quite frankly, as damaging as previous severe delinquency is in a credit report, the scoring models are more dependent on recent credit activity than past activity.  Using credit now and making timely payments while adding new credit accounts is a great way to improve a credit score. 

A good starting point for adding credit is the secured credit card or a credit card offered by credit card companies for people who have less than perfect credit.  Recommended sites include: www.bestcreditcardrates.com and www.lowestcreditcardrates.com.