Tony Banks asked:
Your Equifax credit score is probably the most popular of the three main credit bureaus. The other two are Transunion and Experian. Some lenders look at all three scores when making a decision to approve you for a loan but working on one score usually affects the others as well.
The strategy to boost your Equifax score will depend on the current state of your credit report. If your credit report has a few recent negative items such as charge-offs and collection accounts you want to challenge these items with the credit bureaus to have them deleted from your reports.
The more recent a negative is on your report, the more damage it will do to your scores. If a challenge is unsuccessful you can take another approach. This would be to deal directly with the creditor or collection agency. Just about all collection agencies have one main purpose which is to get paid.
Third party collection agencies usually buy the debt from the original creditor at a fraction of what the original price which means that you can negotiate a lesser amount to pay them to settle the debt. REMEMBER that you are doing this to boost your credit scores so in exchange for coming to an agreement with them you will ask them to delete their entry on your credit report.
On the other hand, if you have a fairly okay credit score and you want to boost it, your approach would be to strength the credit that you already have which can be done by paying down high balances on your credit cards as well as opening a new credit account to add to your available credit IF you don’t already have too many credit cards or revolving accounts.
Lewis
Your Equifax credit score is probably the most popular of the three main credit bureaus. The other two are Transunion and Experian. Some lenders look at all three scores when making a decision to approve you for a loan but working on one score usually affects the others as well.
The strategy to boost your Equifax score will depend on the current state of your credit report. If your credit report has a few recent negative items such as charge-offs and collection accounts you want to challenge these items with the credit bureaus to have them deleted from your reports.
The more recent a negative is on your report, the more damage it will do to your scores. If a challenge is unsuccessful you can take another approach. This would be to deal directly with the creditor or collection agency. Just about all collection agencies have one main purpose which is to get paid.
Third party collection agencies usually buy the debt from the original creditor at a fraction of what the original price which means that you can negotiate a lesser amount to pay them to settle the debt. REMEMBER that you are doing this to boost your credit scores so in exchange for coming to an agreement with them you will ask them to delete their entry on your credit report.
On the other hand, if you have a fairly okay credit score and you want to boost it, your approach would be to strength the credit that you already have which can be done by paying down high balances on your credit cards as well as opening a new credit account to add to your available credit IF you don’t already have too many credit cards or revolving accounts.
Lewis
