4
Mar
2011
Raise Your Credit Score
Raise your credit score!
Repair your credit!
Fix your credit! 100% guaranteed!
You may have seen one of these ads. Such bold promises and with prices to match. However, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has released a Consumer Alert against fraudulent credit repair scams, asking consumers to be wary of claims like these.
Instead of relying on quick credit repair schemes to fix your credit score, why not do the repairing yourself? There are many ways you can raise your credit score without spending a single cent. All you need is some amount of credit score understanding and what steps are needed to maintain or build a good credit.
Improve your Payment History
Your payment history is the first factors included in calculating your credit score, so it makes sense that you raise your credit score by improving your payment history. So how do you do it?
Well, the answer should be obvious. Pay your bills on time. If you have missed any payments, get current and stay that way. As much as possible, dont wait until your bills are at collection. Collection accounts have a tendency to stick in your credit report. Then, you can kiss your hopes to raise your credit score goodbye.
Out of all these tips, the one important thing you need to remember is punctuality in making payments. Thats all. Once youre passed that hurdle, then youll have no trouble trying to raise your credit score.
Lower Amounts Owed
As a rule, credit card debts should be kept at a minimal level. Even if you pay your credit card bills on time, the way credit card companies report your balances to the credit bureau could negatively affect your credit score. The credit card company does it once at any time of the month so if you havent yet made your payments at the time, its going to look to the credit bureau that you have a lot of outstanding credits.
You cant raise your credit score if you keep charging numerous purchases in your credit card. Also, paying off your debt is a better option than moving it around. The most effective way to raise your credit score in this area is by paying down your revolving credit. Sometimes, owning the same amount but with fewer open accounts can help lower your score.
Improve Your Credit History
A trick used by some people in order to make it appear that they have a long credit history is to open multiple new accounts. But this scheme is too risky. If you open a lot of new accounts in a very short time, this could actually lower your score down and make you appear like a risky borrower.
4
Feb
2011
Is business credit card helpful?
Yes is the answer thats comes out almost immediately. That is true at least for most businesses (especially small businesses). Before we delve deeper into how business credit cards are helpful, lets try and understand what a business credit card is.
Put simply, a business credit card is a credit card that is owned by a business and not an individual. To understand this better, you can simply draw an analogy between the business credit cards and business bank accounts, which are in the name of the business as well. Other than that, business credit cards work in pretty much the same fashion as the personal credit cards; with a few exceptions. These exceptions are in the form of flexibility in credit limit, low APRs and some other additional benefits that are available to business credit cards only.
Even from just that, business credit cards seem a good proposition. However, business credit cards would be attractive even without those benefits because the main benefit lies elsewhere. The big-big benefit from a business credit card is realised in terms of business expense accounting. For most small businesses, business expense accounting is a big overhead. With business credit cards, this is handled very easily you just have to ensure that you make all your business expenses on your business credit card and let the personal expenses be on the personal credit card i.e. segregation of business and personal expenses is all you need to do. So the bill for your business credit card will have all the business expenses on it and you wouldnt need to collate all the various bills or sort out the items from your personal credit card bill. The key here is to make sure that you use your business credit card for all your business expenses (or as much as you can). Moreover, a lot of business credit card suppliers realise this need of small business and even organise the business credit card bills in a way that meets the accounting requirements of these businesses. So mostly, they will appropriately group the expenses on the business credit card bill so as to facilitate business expense accounting. In fact, some of the business credit card suppliers go to an extent of providing the bills in a format that can be downloaded and exported to an accounting system i.e. you dont need to enter the data manually in your accounting system. In case the format is not suitable for your accounting system, you can hire a software professional to write a small quick program to convert it into a suitable format.
Thus just one reason – facilitation of business expense accounting, is enough to support the case of small business credit cards.
10
Sep
2010
13
Aug
2010