How To Fix A BAD Credit Score ASAP

What's up you guys? It's Graham here. So, a few weeks ago I made a video going over all of the techniques and tricks that you could use to get past that legendary 800 credit score, all without costing you any money out of pocket. And even though the strategies work really, really well, especially if you destroy the like button, I felt like it would be a good idea to make a follow-up video to that for anyone without a good credit score who wants to know how to turn that around and fix it as soon as possible.

So that means that if your credit score is under about 680 or so, this video is for you. Because if you don't make an effort to get this handled, it will cost you money, and no one likes being costed money. Just think of it this way: If you don't have a good credit score and you don't take the time to fix it, you're gonna be charged a higher interest rate any time you apply for a credit card, an auto loan, a mortgage—you name it. It's going to cost you more money, or they're just not gonna give you a loan in the first place, and I'm not sure which one of those is worse.

So here's exactly what you could do about it and how you can fix it, even if you have late payments and accounts in collections. And let's set a good expectation here that none of this is gonna happen overnight. It's not like you're gonna do all of this and then tomorrow you're gonna be rolling in mortgages and loans and money—it's not how it works. But I will tell you that this is gonna help and make a huge difference over the next few weeks to a few months. All it takes is a small amount of effort on your part to actually follow these techniques and, obviously, to also smash the like button through the YouTube algorithm, which dramatically helps out this channel.

So, with that said, sit back, relax, and enjoy the video. The first thing you need to do, if you have not done this already, is to run your credit report and see exactly what's bringing it down. Now, in terms of where to start, it's really simple: a very quick Google search will bring up a multitude of sites that will show you how to run your credit entirely for free. In fact, CreditSesame.com was the website that sponsored one of my recent videos, and even though they're not sponsoring this one, they are a fantastic service, and I highly recommend them and use them myself.

Then, in addition to that, you're entitled to a free credit report every year from AnnualCreditReport.com. They'll give you actual information about your credit report that's fully up to date every 12 months. So pick one of those options, and then begin reviewing your credit report. And just a quick side note: If any website out there wants you to pay for your report or score, then I wouldn't recommend doing it. There's so many free services out there that will show you everything you need to know about your credit score without spending a single penny. So I wouldn't recommend spending any money if you don't have to, and there you go, I just saved you $9.95.

Next, once you have your report, you're gonna be going through and reviewing it to find out exactly what's impacting your score negatively. And typically, it's gonna be one of these:

Number one, maybe you just don't have enough credit. If you're just building your credit score and you don't really have that much information to begin with, then it's not really likely that you're gonna have the highest score that quickly. If that's the case, go and watch my other video, which I'm going to be linking in the description, and that's going to show you exactly what to do step by step.

The second, probably one of the most common reasons for a bad credit score is, I shudder to say this—a late payment or late payments. This is something that will impact your credit score for seven years, or basically as long as you're gonna have bad luck if you break a mirror indoors. So I'll show you how to fix this shortly— not the mirror, by the way; the credit score. I can't help you if you've got seven years of bad luck if you break a mirror inside, but I can help at least improve your credit score.

The third, look to see if you have any accounts in collections, and if you see this, it's pretty bad. This is what happens if you've had such a late payment that the lender just gives up on you and then writes it off as a total loss. Then they go and sell that delinquent debt to a third-party collections agency, who buys that debt usually for pennies on the dollar, and usually this is gonna happen once you're over one hundred and fifty days late on a payment.

Now fourth, look for any maxed-out amounts in your credit report. This means that maybe if a credit card where you've spent up to the available limit or you're just borrowing as much money as humanly possible without paying down the balance—know if this is you—just be aware that your total credit utilization, or in other words, how much credit you're borrowing based off the credit you have available to you, is going to make up 30% of your credit score. So maxing out these accounts is going to lower your score dramatically.

If they—if look to see if you have any foreclosures or bankruptcies on your credit report. Chances are you should know if you have a foreclosure or bankruptcy on your credit report, so this should not be a complete surprise, hopefully. But there are instances where identities are stolen or things are reported incorrectly, so it's certainly worth it to go and check just to make sure that everything is as it should. From there, you can figure out how best to handle that situation to increase your credit score.

So, in terms of what you could actually do about all of this, let's start right here with late payments. This stays in your credit report for seven years. Now, here's how this works: Lenders typically report late payments to the credit reporting agencies once they're more than 30 days late. So that means, for instance, if you have a credit card payment that's due on the first but you forgot to pay it on the first and you pay it on the tenth, then chances are nothing is going to happen except the credit card company might charge you a late fee, which they'll almost always waive if you just call them up and ask them politely to refund it.

But after those 30 days, if you still have not paid it, then chances are yes, it's going to be showing on your credit report. In terms of how much this impacts your credit score, it's a lot. In fact, your on-time payment history makes up thirty-five percent of your overall credit score, so this one is a very important aspect to cover and take very seriously. Now, if you have a late payment, just be aware that the longer it goes, the worse it gets. Like a 90-day late payment is going to impact your credit much worse than a 60-day late payment, which will impact your credit score a lot worse than a 30-day late payment, and so on.

In addition to that, the sooner the late payment happens, the more it will negatively impact your credit score. So if a late payment happened a few months ago, it's gonna be a lot worse than if that happened five years ago. Basically, the longer ago it happened, the less it'll impact your score. Finally, the number of late payments you have will also play a role in determining what your credit score is. I don't think I need to say this, but I'm gonna say it anyway, because you never know: Having multiple late payments is a lot worse than having just one.

So if you find yourself in this position, you’ve checked your credit report and you see that you've just been blasted with late payments and delinquencies, here's what you could do about it. First, pay anything off that's late as soon as possible. Like I said, it only gets worse the longer it persists, so having a 30-day late payment on your account is a lot better than having a 90-day late payment on your account. So, make an effort to pay off your bills as soon as you possibly can, even if they're already late. Otherwise, if you just leave it alone and you don't do anything about it, after about 180 days, it's gonna be sent to collections, it's gonna be a charge-off, and then you're gonna have a really bad time.

Now secondly, it's always worth it to try to negotiate the terms of the debt and see if they will adjust your account back to current. This means you could reach out to the lender, and if you're having a difficult time making payments, you might be able to work out a payment plan. The reality is that late payments are notorious just for being charged off once they reach a certain point, and then the lender loses a lot of money. So most companies would rather get something than nothing and would much rather negotiate than count it as an entire loss.

The third, if you've already paid off the debt and it's still showing on your credit report as a late payment, then it might be worth it just to call them up and see if they could remove it as a courtesy. Now let me make it very clear: they are not obligated to do this at all, but you also know what they say—you could catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. So sometimes, calling and asking very, very politely can go a very long way. So go ahead, write them a letter, see if they'll remove it, and it's absolutely worth a shot. You got nothing to lose.

The fourth, if all of that fails, then look for any inaccuracies in the credit report and in the late payment, and then dispute it. Really quick, here's a disclaimer: Do not lie ever, but if you find any inaccuracies in the payment dates and so on, you could dispute the late payment as inaccurate. If the company cannot prove that all evidence is indeed correct, they will go ahead and remove it. Doing this should absolutely make a huge difference in your credit score over the next few weeks to the next few months, and it doesn't really take that much time to do at zero cost to you.

So once you knock out those late payments, let's move on to the next one: accounts in collections. This stays in your credit report for seven years. Now, like I mentioned, this happens when you're more than 150 days late on a payment. The bank just thinks, "Well, you don't—we're never collecting any of that anyway," so they're gonna be writing it off as a total loss. We're gonna be selling that debt to a third-party collections agency for pennies on the dollar, and then it's their problem. That's usually the point where some third-party debt collections agency starts hounding you on the phone saying you owe the full amount and then starts resorting to scare tactics to try to get you to pay it, and that collection is also going to be showing up on your credit report.

Now, when it comes to figuring out how to handle this, there are a few different strategies. The first thing you should do is try to dispute it if you see any errors or inaccuracies, like if you think there's an error on the credit reporting side and that you paid off the debt but it's still showing on your accounts, then go ahead and dispute it. Once you file that dispute, they have 30 days to respond. On the other hand, if you think there's an error on the part of the debt collector, you could ask that they validate the debt to prove it is indeed that money now. They're gonna have to prove the validity of the debt and that it's actually yours, and if they can't do that, it is removed.

Because debts like this are often bought and sold multiple times over those seven years, there's a good chance there will be an error along the way that you could seize and take advantage of, and that way you could have it removed and improve your credit score. The second, sometimes you can negotiate to pay off the debt in exchange for removing it from your credit report. Now this one is a bit of a shady gray area because technically, if the debt is true, then they should be reporting it as is, but sometimes they also want their money and they will agree to remove it if you pay them.

So if that's the case, here's what you need to know: Debt collectors will often pay a small fraction of what your actual debt is and then try to profit anything above that. So that means, for example, if you have a debt of $10,000 that goes to collections, then maybe that debt collector bought that debt for $1,000. So anything above that is gonna be their profit, so sometimes that means you can negotiate a ten-thousand-dollar debt all the way down to a two-thousand-dollar payoff and get it removed from your credit reports because those debt collection agencies would rather get some money and some profit than not collect anything. So again, it's always worth a shot just to see if they're gonna do this.

The third, we should talk about paying off a debt collector because it's another gray area because technically, paying off a debt in collections is not really going to improve your credit score, even though it'll now show as paid. It's still going to be on your report that you had an account that goes to collections, and that will stay on there for seven years. So if this is the case and you did pay off something in collections, then you could go and file a dispute with the credit reporting agencies. They will then try to validate that debt from the debt collection company. Now, at that point, the debt collection company really has no financial incentive to respond to the credit bureaus, and a lot of the time, they won't even bother responding to it. So that means it will be removed from your credit report within 30 days.

Now, I do want to mention: do all of this at your own risk, and certainly do your own research before you pay off any debt collector and always try to negotiate that debt down. Also, not before disputing the debt is actually yours and accurate and have them verify that. The fourth, if you have any maxed-out accounts on your credit report, then this is usually a pretty easy fix. The credit bureaus really just want to make sure that you're not out there maxing out all of your credit cards and that you're only using a small amount of your overall credit that you have available to you. Ideally, you want to be using under 10% of your overall credit limit so that that way you're seen as the safer borrower, and therefore you get a higher credit score.

So that means if you're out there just maxing out your credit cards—then, well, first of all, don't do that! But secondly, the fastest, easiest fix out there is just to pay down your credit cards. So now you owe less money; that's going to almost immediately fix your credit score within the next week or two without anything else needed from your end. But if you don't have enough money to pay it all down, this sounds so weird for me to even mention this as a solution, but it is a solution to go out there and open up more credit.

Now here's how this works: the credit bureaus don't care about the dollar amount that you're borrowing; all they care about is how much credit you're borrowing compared to the total credit limit that you have. So if you have a $1,000 credit line but you spend a thousand dollars on it, then you maxed it out. But if you have a $10,000 credit line and you spend that exact same $1,000, then technically, you're only using 10% of your overall credit, and that's good.

So one of the techniques that I use with all of this is just to have a lot of available credit with all of them with really high limits. That's gonna help lower your credit utilization and help improve your score, all without paying down any additional money. Please, I beg you, be responsible with this one! I cannot in good conscience recommend someone who's maxing out their credit cards just to go and get more credit. So most likely, if you have a spending problem, at least acknowledge that, and the best solution for you is just to pay down the credit cards, and that's gonna be the best for you if you got a spending problem.

But if you just have a low credit limit to begin with, then yes, opening up more credit and using it responsibly will help your score dramatically. So finally, let's talk about the worst from all of them in terms of harming your credit, and that would be bankruptcy and foreclosure. Now, here's the thing: Bankruptcy is going to stay on your credit report for seven to ten years, and removing it is going to be very, very difficult, if not impossible. But as with anything I mentioned, if you can find any errors or inaccuracies in the reporting of the information, then go ahead and dispute it—it's worth trying.

Also, if it stays on your credit report for longer than 7 to 10 years, then that's also worth disputing. The same also applies to foreclosures, which will stay on your credit report for seven years. If the lender is no longer in business, then also go ahead and dispute it. Otherwise, unfortunately, this is really one of those things you're gonna have to work around and not avoid. In most cases, removing either one of these is going to be extremely difficult unless you find an error.

So it's more important to work around it and improve everything else that will boost up your score so that way this doesn't impact it as much. Now, in the past, I've made a video on this showing exactly how to build up your credit from nothing and exactly how you could do this step by step. So instead of going and mentioning all of that right here in this video, I'm gonna link to that as well down below in the description, and that's exactly how you can fix a bad credit score entirely on your own without paying any third party to do it for you.

The process is fairly simple; it shouldn't take you too long to do, and it's going to help you save a lot of money any time you apply for an auto loan, a mortgage, a credit card, and basically anything you need to borrow money, or for anything they need to run your credit score for. This is going to help you dramatically. And again, all I ask in return is that if you found it helpful, then at least just hit the like button. It does help out the channel dramatically.

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