Properly managing your credit report can open many doors

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Jimmy and Sylvia Rios [submitted]
As an underwriter for over 20 years in the all the financing arenas, I’ve learned how to read the single most important financial documents in your life: Your credit reports. You might have negative items — inaccurate or otherwise — dragging down your score. This can result in problems getting financing, service through insurance or utility companies, and now even getting a job.

Here are five tips to clean up your credit report and potentially bring up your score and open the financial doors the future may hold:

  1. Pull your credit reports
  2. Lower your credit utilization ratio
  3. Take care of collections
  4. Go through your credit reports line by line
  5. Challenge any errors

Pull Your Credit Reports
While it’s great that you can get your FREE credit report from Equifax, Experian and Transunion once per year (annualcreditreport.com), There are a few shortcomings: You don’t get to see your scores and you don’t see a side-by-side comparison with the other bureaus in one sitting. This is very important as every bureau could report different items and it doesn’t help if you can’t see a clear picture off all three bureaus to see where the errors lie.

Lower Your Credit Utilization Ratio
One of the biggest contributors to your credit score falls in the amount of available credit that you have. Most people don’t know that they should strive to keep their debt to limit ratio around 30-40% of their limit. So, if you owe $700 on a $1,000 credit card this puts your debt to limit at 70% and forces huge changes to your score. A simple solution is to call your creditor and ask for an increase. The simple act of changing the limit from $1000 to $2000 puts that limit to 35% and you didn’t have to pay anything.

Take Care of Collections
Oversight or plain disregard of a debt can lead to a collection. Many times, there are errors in billing or even Identity theft that causes an account to show up on your credit. The misconception with many is that if you just call and pay the debt, it automatically will come off your credit. The REALITY is that many collection accounts are sold to collection agencies for pennies on the dollar and these collection companies many times don’t follow the laws to properly collect this debt. They also don’t follow the necessary protocols to get the item removed once paid.
With our guidance at Next Level Credit, we discern the best course of action for each item and get your credit reflecting properly to get rid of those eyesores.

Go Through Your Credit Reports Line-by-Line
In October 2017 there were 317,200 complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Of these, 85,000 had credit reporting problems and it could be much higher as many don’t report to the CFPB.

When looking through your credit line by line look for the following:

A. Creditors who reported incorrect accounts as being charged off or in default
B. Accounts you don’t recognize
C. Inaccurate reporting of late payments
D. Judgments against you that weren’t issued
E. Addresses or names you’ve never used

Next Level Credit can come in to do the work for you and make sure it’s done right.

Challenge Any Errors
Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act you have the right to challenge an item on your credit report. If the creditor or reporting agency can’t verify the item’s accuracy, it must be removed from your credit report. You’ll get a written summary of the results usually within 3 to4 weeks after the process is complete.

Next Level Credit, LLC is owned by Jimmy Rios, who has over 20 years in the mortgage and lending fieldss and is also a licensed Real Estate agent with EXP Realty. After seeing the problems that homebuyers sometimes face, Jimmy teamed up with his wife, Sylvia Rios, who serves as his credit manager, to create a “boutique” company in Maricopa to help the community with a serious problem that many people, sometimes through no fault of their own, have to deal with.

Jimmy or Sylvia Rios live in Maricopa and can be reached at:
480-935-6049
480-341-2901
[email protected]
[email protected]
NextLevelCredit.net

This sponsored content was first published in the April edition of InMaricopa magazine.