How To Increase Your Credit Score in Days, Not Years

Credit bureaus say it’s one of the most useful trends to hit the mortgage market in years. Yet most home loan applicants--and some mortgage brokers and realty agents--still don’t know about it.

It’s called "rapid re-scoring." It’s potentially a mortgage saver, a home saver, and a life saver for anybody whose credit scores have been lowered by false information on their credit files or by a bad past when it comes to credit lines.

Let’s say you’re applying for a loan on a new home you want to buy, but the loan officer tells you that your credit score is too low to qualify for the loan program you need to be bale to make the purchase.  Don’t panic, rapid re-scoring may be able to help you get your scores to where they need to be.

High credit scores indicate that you are a solid credit risk and deserve the best treatment (interest rates and terms) that the lender has available. Lower scores, on the other hand, indicate that you have credit problems and might default on a new loan so you are a much higher risk and don’t deserve the red-carpet treatment. Some consumers’ scores come in artificially low because their credit files contain outdated and false information. To correct such mistakes, loan applicants typically have to endure weeks or months of hassles contacting creditors, pleading with them to amend the information they erroneously sent to the repositories. That process, in turn, usually takes far longer than a loan officer can afford to wait to move ahead with your application. You have to come back and file a new loan application, pull new credit scores and hope for the best. Sometimes the delay costs you a shot at the favorable interest rates that prevailed at the time of your first application--and just may knock you out of contention for the home and the loan package you wanted.

Today, loan applicants have a new option, working through their mortgage broker or loan officer: They can get their files updated, corrected, and re-scored within 48 to 72 hours. Though participating local credit reporting agencies cannot advertise their re-scoring services to the general public, they often let their mortgage lending clients know about them.  The re-scoring agencies negotiate special contracts with the three major credit bureaus, allowing them to obtain "universal data correction" forms from creditors--often within a day or two--and then send them directly to repositories for immediate correction of your file. The staff-intensive service costs money. Some lenders are charged $30 per tradeline, per bureau, and/or per borrower.

A lender or broker trying to save a marginal application from a borrower with a few credit errors on file might be charged $120 or $150 to get a rapid re-score within 72 hours.  A more extensive re-scoring could cost two or three times that amount. But it can be worth it for the borrower and the lender. Many rapid re-scores raise credit scores by 30, 50 or more points, depending upon the nature of the errors in the file. That jump in score, however, frequently pulls a borrower out of the "sub-prime" category, and can save thousands of dollars in interest in fees over the term of the mortgage.

Don’t confuse rapid re-scoring with "credit repair." Re-scoring is a legitimate service expressly sanctioned by the credit repositories through special contracts with select credit reporting agencies. "Credit repair", by contrast, often involves illegal attempts to dupe the repositories and lenders alike

If you have credit concerns and would like to discuss a re-scoring with one of our experts in the Jacksonville or Ponte Vedra Beach Florida Area, please call our toll-free number or contact us here.  One of our experts will be in touch soon to see if we can help you get that next loan to go through by increasing your credit worthiness.