Don't have a whole lot of time to bring up your score?

Here are some quick ways (in less than 30 days!):

1. Pay down your credit cards. Paying off your installment loans (personal loans, car loans, etc with set monthly installments) may  help your score, but not as dramatically as paying down -- or paying off -- revolving accounts like credit cards. Each individual credit card should hold a balance of 25% or below of your maximum credit allowance.
2. Don't use your whole credit line every month, even if you pay your balance in full. Your available credit is averaged over your billing cycle, which is sometimes less than 30 days. If your limit is say, $5000 and you charge $5000, even if you pay it off each month, your credit balance is still going to show $2500 (a 50% usage limit), which is going to make your score plunge.
3. Is your credit report correctly reporting your credit limits for your cards? If not, you can call your credit card issuer and ask them to update the list (only if they are reporting the limit lower than your actual limit set by the creditor).
4. Don't use credit card issuers who don't report your credit limit. Usually this is a problem you only run into with secured credit cards, but were you aware that American Express cards and Capital One do not report credit limits? In this case the bureaus typically use your highest balance as a proxy for your credit limit, which is going to make you look like you are maxed out.
5. Ask a trusted friend or family member to add you to one of their old cards as an authorized user, maybe one that hasn't been used in awhile. The older your credit history, the better. If your mother agrees to put you as an authorized user on a card that she; had for 20 years, you could see your score increase dramatically.
6. If you've been a good customer for years, but had a rough patch and missed a payment - you might be able to ask your creditor to "erase" a negative listing.
7. If you have a student loan that you have defaulted on or have missed payments, you can enter into a "rehab program" which will get your account back on track after 12 months (ok, so it's not a short-term strategy.) Sallie Mae regularly upgrades your loan status to "Paid as Agreed" if you make a series of 12 on-time payments.
8. Dispute old negatives. Say your insurance company never paid a medical bill and now you have a collections account. You can continue protesting that the charge was unjust, or you can try disputing the account with the credit bureaus as "not mine." The older and smaller a collection account, the more likely the collection agency won't have bothered to update with the correct info and the credit bureau won't be able to match up computer records, thus removing from your credit report completely.
9. Get a collection agency to agree to remove a debt from your report if you pay it. This method is called "pay for delete" and it works like a charm on smaller amounts of $500 and under, especially medical collections. Remember to get the agreement in writing before you pay them anything, and only send a money order after you get them to agree. Again this is agree to delete from your report, not just mark as paid.
10. Target "easy" errors on your credit report that have a bang for the buck.
    • Negatives that truly are not yours: Late payments, charge-offs, collections
    • Any Accounts listed anything other than "current" or "paid as agreed" if you paid on time and in full.
    • Accounts that are still listed as unpaid that were included in a bankruptcy.
    • Negative items older than seven years (10 in the case of bankruptcy) that should have automatically fallen off your report.
    • Any account that is listed as "Closed by the credit grantor" when it wasn't should be fixed as this is definitely a negative

If you'll notice the first 3 items concerned paying down credit balances. This is for a reason - high credit balances can kill the credit score of someone who otherwise has perfect credit. It is weighted HEAVILY in your credit score. Get those balances down!

This and more great information on credit reporting, scores, disputing credit and even sample letters of dispute can be found at www.creditinfocenter.com

Here’s to better credit scores for all!