Ways to Improve Your Credit to Help Get an Auto Loan

[Soup]

Auto Loan Daily - Ways to Improve Your Credit to Help Get an Auto Loan

How do car shoppers give themselves the best possible chance to get approved for an auto loan? They have to go in with the best possible credit score they can.

Harriet Johnson Brackey, personal finance columnist for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and Gerri Detweiler, credit advisor for credit.com, have several tips for consumers to help boost their credit scores in a short-term time frame, about three to six months, and also in a longer time frame, about a year.

Gerri Detweiler’s (pictured above) short-term tips:
· Check your credit report and fix any mistakes. For example, other people’s information showing up on your report. Or a loan that you paid off is showing as still having a balance.
· Do not close old accounts. Typically, it hurts more than it helps it.
· You could ask a family member to be on their credit card account as an authorized user. This is very controversial though.
· Paying down your credit cards is the best thing to do.


Harriet Johnson Brackey’s (pictured above) short-term tips:
· Pay down credit cards to at least 50% of your limit or less. This will bump up your score in the short-term.
· Pare back credit card accounts to 2 or 3, instead of 5 with small balances.

[97talon]

Those are some very very basic tips that everyone should know anyways.

[Soup]

You'd be surprised how little people actually know about credit.

[tony275]

my suggestion to boost your credit score is to get a gas credit card, buy gas, pay it off online immediately. few friends did [ we're only 17-18 years old ] and their score jumped 100 points after a year of doing that.

[Soup]

I've heard from some experts that it's better to keep a balance on a card because you're showing that you're responsible with debt.

[tony275]

sounds reasonable.
idk for sure, that's all i heard though, for someone in my position [ 17 yrs old ] was to get a...bp/marathon gas card or something, get gas, pay it off, and that'll at least boost my credit score, other than my checking account w/ debit card. i've only overdrawn my checking once, and paid it back right away, so i'm hoping my score hasn't gone down b/c of it. :P