I urge you to please research this, as I am not an expert, but simply passing along something that I had heard: Apparently it helps to add someone who has good credit to the account of the person who has poor credit. Source: "cash for your good credit" (but replace the word "for" with a digit).

More legal answer: Maybe you could use your credit instead of hers?

(Far) less legal answer: Identity theft.

For the record, bankruptcy HURTS your credit. OK, here are a few simple ways:

1. Make sure you owe an amount low enough so that your minimum payments are LESS than 30% of your income. If you don't meet that goal, get a raise and/or payoff some debt. ALSO, try to negotiate lower rates.
2. Make sure that NO revolving debt is over about 60% utilized.
3. Make sure you have no more than 2 inquiries.
4. Make sure you have no bad liens.
5. Make sure you have no government documents on your report.
6. make consistent payments on accounts.

Various things can take 1month, up to 6months, or up to 2 years. I believe a bankruptcy can take up to 10 years to clear.

BTW Opening up a new account generally creates at LEAST 1 inquiry. So even asking for a credit card can hurt your credit.

Steve

The FASTEST way to improve your score is to go to each credit bureau and open up a dispute for the negative items. In at least SOME cases, the creditor will fail to verify the information and the bureau will remove it from your credit file. You must do this for each credit bureau - and you should be able to open the disputes online.

The credit bureaus have up to 30 days to verify the info and if they can't (creditor doesn't respond), the item comes off and the credit score improves.

Avoid screwing around with debts over $1000 and with negative entries that are over 6 years old. A creditor is more likely to sue you if your debt is over $1000 so you should "let sleeping dogs lie". A debt that is over 6 years old is going to fall off automatically after 7 years anyway so, again, let sleeping dogs lie.

If you have a credit card or other item that has a good history, except for an older (>2 years) late status, you can sometimes ask them to remove the old late payment entry as a courtesy. Some will. Some wont.

Also, as someone mentioned above. If you have a family member with GOOD credit, ask them to add you as an "authorized user" to one or more of their credit cards that have never been late. This can also work to improve your credit.

One more tip: If you have entries on your credit report from collection agencies, you can often negotiate with them, offering to pay a debt off in full in exchange for them removing the bad entry. They will often tell you this is "illegal". They are lying. There is nothing "illegal" about them removing the entries. It's just their standard reply.

It takes some work but it's not impossible to significantly raise your score if you know how to deal with them.

There are lots of other strategies but I'm not going to get into all of them here.

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The 2 things that helped me the most was:


1. Disputing
2. Asking for a lower rate (Especially when your making a nice size payment)

Asking for a lower rate doesn't do anything for your credit score.

I won't go into detail since I would be repeating what was already said in this thread. I actually have a website dedicated to this issue. (it would be inappropriate for me to link it so I won't.)

AnnualCreditReport.com ->

Sample Credit Report Dispute Letter of Explanation

It takes awhile.

Without knowing what caused the bad credit, it's hard to say.

If it was late payments and what not, you have to just dispute everything you can and then not miss them for 6 months, then try to renegotiate.

wolfmmiii, actually got it pretty much covered.

Side note: if you fix everything you can and do everything right for six months, your credit should dramatically improve. That's about as "lifehack" as it can be.

As far as his tip: well it's illegal if they offer it up like that, if you suggest it, they're allowed to agree.

If her credit score sucks the last thing she needs is more debt.

The only reason anyone cares about a credit score is because they want more debt.

Tip, if you take out a loan to build a site about credit repair, you can use your site to repair your credit, because you're not going to rank for sh__.

It's been a long while since I was in the mortgage business, but I think it helps to:

close credit accounts she is not using and that do not have a balance

ask for a lower credit limit on existing credit lines, perhaps keeping in
mind the 60% ratio Seasoned suggested. Too much available credit is bad.

keep current on payments, but make effort to completely pay off a debt
and then the next and then the next (keeping in mind wolfmmiii's comments)

Dave Ramsey is a very good resource on this stuff.

Great information here, I was wondering if I add her as an Authorized user on one of my Credit Cards will it improve her credit or just destroy my credit because of her bad credit?

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The following can work very well to remove bad credit items from your report:

1. Get a copy of your credit report
2. Send by registered mail (not email, not phone) a letter disputing each negative item
3. The Credit Company has 30 days to mark the items as disputed on your report
4. After 30 days check the report. 90% of the time the disputes will not be acknowledged
5. Send a registered letter to the credit agency stating that they failed to mark the indicated items as disputed. Due to their failure to comply with the law you would like the items removed from your report. If the items are not removed from the report, you will commence legal action to have them removed

It is much easier for the credit company to remove the items from your report than fight you on their failure to comply with the law.


Edit: I missed some of wolfmiii's posts that follow the same idea

From discussion:

It is not fraudulent to dispute a post on your report

If the credit company fails to post a notice of dispute, they have failed to comply with the law. It does not matter whether the disputed item is legit or not.

Some credit companies will reply to you to dispute your claims. This is irrelevant. They are required to post on your report that the items are disputed. Arguing with you about whether the items are valid does nothing.

In precedents, courts have sided with consumers over credit companies who fail to comply. Courts have stated that the validity of the credit entry is irrelevant. It is the credit companies responsibility to comply with the process and the law.

The "dispute" laws were designed to protect consumers in the US from incorrect information posted in their credit files.

Many "clean up your credit" books recommend the dispute method. If the debts are old there may be good reason to try it. The lender may be out of business, the debt may have been written off, the company may have been sold or staff downsized.

BUT - if this is fairly recent credit card debt - it won't work. Those credit issuing banks will re-verify every month if necessary.

Let's face it - the reason for "disputing the claims" is to improve credit - so you can USE credit again. Is that the reason for asking for a "quick" way to improve credit?

Are these old debts - or recent? Are there write-offs - settlements? - are they "slow pay" or in default? If there one reason for failure to pay - or is this a case of overspending and under-paying? Credit cards companies will often accept less than the full amt - there are free services to help you negotiate lower payments. Bankruptcy (Chapter 13?) should also be on the table if there's no way to pay the debt.

One good list on the link below - ck out #5....
http://www.creditcards.com/credit-ca...rrors-1270.php


P.S. Adding your kids as they grow into adulthood to help them establish credit is one thing - adding a non-relative with a history of bad money management is a totally different ball game.

A timely report by John Oliver:
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Credit Reports (HBO) - YouTube

ALL books could recommend this method as it is the very first thing you do when trying to clean up credit. If a book doesn't recommend this tactic, throw the book away.

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