"I’D LIKE TO BUY A HOME SOON, BUT I WANT TO RAISE MY CREDIT SCORE BEFORE I APPLY FOR A MORTGAGE. ARE THERE ANY QUICK WAYS THAT I CAN BUMP UP MY SCORE A LITTLE?" If your credit score isn’t a high as it should be, you can certainly take steps to improve it, but there are really no quick fixes. Building up your credit and improving your credit score can only happen if you continually work at it and improvement will only come over time. However, that being said, there are a coupl

Over the past year and a half, the big three credit bureaus of Equifax, TransUnion and Experian have made some subtle yet important changes to the way negative information is reported on credit reports. What does this mean for you? It could mean that your FICO credit score has risen recently—even if your debts and monthly payments haven’t changed. Following a study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, all three credit bureaus began scrubbing all civil judgments and ta

Credit scoring is a system creditors use to help determine whether to give you credit. Information about you and your credit experiences, such as your bill-paying history, the number and type of accounts you have, late payments, collection actions, outstanding debt, and the age of your accounts, is collected from your credit application and your credit report. Using a statistical program, creditors compare this information to the credit performance of consumers with similar p