Complete Guide on How to Fix Your Credit Fast and for Free in 2021
(Updated for 2021)
Did you know that having good credit vs. having bad credit can save you thousands of dollars a year? Not only can it save you thousands, but it can also help make your life much easier. Your credit will determine the amount of access you will have too many financial tools, and having bad credit can stop you from having access to many of these major life tools. So we recommend that you take a few minutes to read this and learn about the simple steps you can take to save thousands of dollars and make your life so much easier!
We are going to give you the secrets to not only fixing your credit fast and for free but also how you can continue to grow it throughout your life to get even better rates on the major financial tools you will use in your lifetime. Yes, this is all going to be for free, so don’t worry you won’t need a bank card.
We have been through hard financial times ourselves, and if we had someone there to be able to show us how we could of fixed this with only a little effort, it would have saved us so much hardship and trouble. Our goal is to hopefully help you not have to go through that! So hopefully you can put this information to good use, and become the success you are meant to be!
Major Steps to Fixing Your Credit Fast and For Free:
- Get Your Credit Report & Score
- Begin Budgeting & Planning Your Finances
- Eliminate Any Unnecessary Debt
- Removing All Bad Credit Marks off Your Credit Report
- Building Your Credit!
We are so amazed to see such great technology that has made it so easy to fix your credit fast. Even better this technology is at your finger tops almost all the time! You are more likely than not reading this from your phone right now, and guess what, that is what you are going to use to help fix your credit! So let’s get started.
Getting Your Credit Report and Knowing Your Credit Score
Getting your credit score shouldn’t be very hard, and you are given a full credit report from all 3 of the credit agencies for free at least 1 time a year! To get your full credit repair from all 3 agencies, and this is the one you want to use later for help with removing anything unwanted on your credit report, you will need to go to annualcreditreport.com. You are given at least a report for your credit once a year for free from all 3 agencies through this site. 
This is the most official way to get all 3 at once, and this is what you will use to help remove all the unwanted items from your credit report. So we highly recommend you use this service to get your credit report when you want to begin fixing your credit!
Also, we highly recommend that you also get one of the free credit score checking apps for your phone. You can always also access at least your credit score form 1-2 agencies at all times with these amazing free apps that you can get on your phone easily. The most popular and our recommendation for these apps are either Credit Karma or Credit Sesame.
Both offer some amazing tools to help you with your credit and to be able to consistently keep a check on your credit. So making sure you have one of these apps on your phone is the way you will be able to check your credit score at any time and be able to constantly stay on top of it. It will also be a reminder on what you are working towards, and that is why we recommend that you put the icon of the app you choose on the homepage of your phone
Our Recommended Way to Keep Track of Your Credit Score is To Use 1 of These 2 Apps for your phone: Credit Karma or Credit Sesame
After you have done these 2 things, you should move onto the next items of things to do below!
Begin Budgeting and Planning Your Finances
You should always try and budget and plan your finances. Keep good track of your finances is the best way to go about achieving financial success. You will be able to allocate correctly where your money will go to, and be able to save the most using this approach, and that is why we highly recommend you do so. There are also some amazing applications that can really help you do this well.
Our Recommended Way to Do This: Use the Personal Finance app on your phone to Budget and Track Your Finances! Then you can plan out your finances with that and by writing it down and setting goals on a word document or on paper even. Check out our article that details the best apps to take control of your finances by planning and budgeting!
Eliminate Any Unnecessary Debt
The next thing you will want to do after you have done setting up your budget and financial plan, is to eliminate any unnecessary debt.
Our Recommended Way to Do This: The best way to begin with this is to have a financial budget and plan in place. With this budget and plan you will want to concentrate on 2 major things including;
- Reducing Spending
- Creating Additional Income Streams
If you are doing at least 1 of these 2 things, but hopefully both, you will then be able to allocate additional funds to removing any unnecessary debt. However remember, that having some debt and paying on that debt monthly will significantly help to increase your credit score, so make sure you don’t eliminate all debt, just any unnecessary debt that will cost you significantly more money then you want.
Getting All Bad Credit Marks or Problems Removed off of Your Credit Report to Significantly Improve Your Credit Score!
This is the big one that you will want to follow on how to do it correctly. We have laid out the steps and linked you to any and all necessary things you will need to do this. This can significantly help improve your credit drastically, and if you have any bad marks on your credit, we highly recommend that you use this to get them removed as fast as possible! These marks will greatly hinder your credit score and cause you to pay significantly more for credit or not even get access to many of the financial and credit tools that are so prevalent in today’s society, so make sure to utilize this immediately if this is causing you problems!
We are here to help people who have bad marks on their credit overcome this major challenge. You can get them removed if you follow these steps! Now this process is pretty tedious and hard, and that is why we recommend using a credit repair company, however, you can definitely do this yourself if you do not have the money to use a credit repair company so follow along…
- The first thing you need to do is go and get your credit score. You can get all 3 scores from the different agencies with annualcreditreport.com. You can get this once a year for free. Using the typical free sources only get you 1-2 scores, so that is why you should use annualcreditreport.com to get all 3.
- Once you have done this, review your credit and being prepare any material you can get that you will be sending to the different agencies to ask them to remove the bad marks on your credit. You can ask them to do this for you because they are not always tracking and keeping records of every and all of your transactions, and thus when you do go to challenge them they won’t have the necessary documents to stop your challenge! That is what you want to ask for when you challenge them, for them to prove that you had made all those transactions that got you the negative marks. That is why when you send in the dispute, challenging the marks in your credit report, they will remove them off of your credit report!
- Here are the links to the dispute pages to dispute these negative marks on your credit report:
- Now you are going to be sending these disputes to all the credit agencies that have a bad mark on them for whatever reason it states. You are going to want to tell them that they need to remove this mark because it is either a mistake, it wasn’t you, or whatever reason you have, and that they need to show all the documents proving that it was you that got the negative marks on your credit report. You will ask them to show you every and all documentation that they have to prove that it was you, and much more likely than not, they will not be able to do so! Then what they need to do is remove the credit marks on your credit report for you to account for this lack of proof! This is the key to understanding how and why this process works!
- This can typically take 3-6 months of waiting to be done, as the company will try and see if they can prove it was you, but they more than likely won’t be able to! You should make sure that you consistently follow-up and be on top of it to ensure that this works. That is why we recommend using a credit repair company, not only will they do this for you, but they have additional pressures and tactics they will use to help make sure that you get these items removed from your credit! This is again why we highly recommend you checkout our recommended credit repair company! However, again doing this yourself can get you the results you are looking for if you consistently follow-up and stay on top of it!
Building Your Credit!
You can easily begin building credit again if you have some money. If you do not, you will need to save up money to do so, by budgeting and planning your finances, you can ensure that you do. Once you have saved up your money, you can now begin building up credit again through 2 great sources we highly recommend the most. These services include the Self App, and getting a Secured Credit Card.
The Self Lending app Self is a great company that will help you save money and build credit at the same time, and that is why we love recommending it to you! What you will do is sign up with Self, and then you will pick an amount you will send them every month to save. They will then count this money as a payment you have made to them, and report it to the credit agencies! Then at the end of the term you have picked, they will give you all this money you have saved to then use on whatever you need it for! It is a wonderful service that we just can’t recommend enough!
You can also get a secured credit card which will ask you to send them an amount of money, then they will give you a credit card with that amount as the balance to use. You then can use the card, and make additional payments on the money you then spend. The amount you gave them initially is used as collateral for the card, and it is covered by the amount that you sent initially.
These 2 ways are a great way to begin building credit again for anyone!
Additional Things to Know to Increase Your Credit Score!
Here are some additional things we highly recommend that you do to help with increasing and fixing your credit. These are things that you should continue to do throughout your lifetime to ensure that your credit continues to grow and remains that way!
Since your credit score will determine the amount of access you will have to so many financial tools, having a good score is not enough. Your credit history will also affect your score. Thus, by following these tips that bad credit lifeline has identified, you can be able to maximize your score.
Limit hard inquiries on your credit
Usually, there are two kinds of inquiries that will show up on your credit report. While one will have a negative effect on your score, the other will have minimal to almost none.
- Hard inquiry: While this inquiry is subjective, this type of inquiry will affect your inquiry negatively. This means that when you take out things such as loans or credit cards, they directly impact your score.
- Soft inquiry: This inquiry does not have any effect on your credit score. Some of the types of a soft inquiry include using a credit monitoring service, checking your credit report or having your employer pull out your score.
To make it simpler, a hard inquiry relates to the times when you make an application for credit while a soft inquiry will relate to when you are just checking on your loan and not seeking one.
Thus, you should ensure that you keep your hard inquiries to no more than two in a 2-year period. Once you do it more than twice, it negatively affects your score as you start to lose points as it depicts you as someone who is desperate for money.
Have a variety of credit account types
There are usually four types of credit accounts. Depending on which one it is, it will determine what kind of impact it will have on your credit score. These types of credit accounts are:
- Real estate loans: This one relates to home and mortgage refinancing
- Installment loans: These are loans paid over time such as car loans and student loans.
- Credit cards: This relates to cards such as Visa and MasterCard.
- Retail cards: This relates to a line of credit given by a merchant.
Thus, you should diversify those that you have but not necessarily close them. This is because a credit account type such as that for an installment loan will have a bigger impact on your credit score as compared to that of a retail card.
Use credit utilization ratios
If you want to kill your credit score completely, you should max out your credit card. While you might be mistaken to think that paying your card on time even though you have maxed it out is okay, this is wrong.
If you can, you should try and only use 25% of the funds in your credit card. If you already have, you should pay for it so that it reaches the 25% level. Once you do this, it will go a long way in increasing your bad credit lifeline.
At least open one major credit card
While it is not something that you should get right away, you should work towards it. Even though you might be having a bad credit, you should consider it. Usually, having a credit card implies to the credit companies that you are a person who can be trusted and thus it improves your credit score. All you need to do is work your way up to a level in which you can become eligible to acquire one and get it. It does not mean that you should use it but having one is what is more important if you want to skip the hurdles that credit institutions usually have in place.
Grow your credit history
While you may believe that closing your account which has a debt will make it go away, it actually stops it from building a history. This means that your score will be negatively impacted since you will be deemed a defaulter.
Therefore, you should keep your accounts open until you finish paying off the credit card debt. Since there are several factors such as your payment history, the credit type, new credit, credit length, and the amount you owe which will be examined, they each will play a role in determining your credit score.
Also, you should ensure that you clean your credit history by eliminating any late payments or collections that may still be present. While there is the option of waiting for 7 years for the items to be removed, you can have the option of removing them yourself if you have completed them. Once you do this, your loan applications will not be affected by those items when you apply for a bad credit lifeline loan.
Pay Bills on Time
Your credit score is directly related to your payment. If you really want you credit score to soar up, you should ensure that you make your payments on time. This means that if you know that there is a long outstanding debit on one of your accounts, you should make every effort to pay it off. This is because your history will show that you cannot be trusted to repay money borrowed by other lenders if you make an application with them for a loan.
Whether you decide to make monthly payments or decide to be paying some extra money on top of that which is already required, you will have an edge on your credit score and it will go a long way in optimizing your credit score. Additionally, you will become more eligible for higher bad credit lifeline loans once you do this.
Final Thoughts to Fixing Your Credit Fast
If you follow all these things you will easily be able to fix your credit fast. Also, these methods are the free ways in which to fix your credit fast, so that anyone can, no matter their financial situation! We are here to help people, the way we wished we were helped. We have gone through the troubles of having these problems firsthand, and know the pain they can cause. So please use these to help yourself out and fix your credit fast today!
In addition to just fixing your credit score fast, you should be continuously optimizing your credit score. Your credit can have great benefits for you in the future and throughout your life. Since there are those small mistakes or things that you might not entirely know, we have laid out the biggest ones so that you do know!
Everyone should be aware of what consequences they will receive on their credit report for making certain actions, and we wished this was taught better in the school system, however it is not. That is why we have taken it upon ourselves to help! In addition to the above ways of fixing your credit fast, we also have additional great credit hacks that you should checkout as well that can help fix your credit too!
If need be, you can visit the credit bureau to talk to one of the agents who can also advice you on which areas you can rectify to improve on your score. At times, they may also ask you to try practicing debt consolidation which also yields great benefits since all your debts are in one place and you can pay them off all at once by only using one card. While this may not seem logical, it will actually lead to more savings and increase your chances when you apply for a Bad Credit Installment Loan.
