By Jayden J. Jones

Many people are willing to do whatever it takes to improve their credit scores but their efforts are in vain because they are focusing on tasks that do not add value to their “fixing bad credit” plan. Repairing credit would normally take longer time to see results and it is complete waste of time focusing on certain things that couldn’t work.

Hence, here are a few common mistakes that you should avoid if you seriously want to increase your FICO score:

1. Shut down your old credit accounts – Based on the credit scoring system, your score is determined by the age of your accounts. Therefore, shutting down your old credit accounts could only hurt your credit score as you are making your credit history looks younger than before and it does not bring any significance to your credit rebuilding plan.

2. Relying on credit repair companies – Many fraudulent cases particularly identity theft and big upfront payment scams have affected the lives of innocent consumers, leaving them to despair as their credit scores are still badly damaged and they suffer tremendous loss after being the victims of those unscrupulous credit repair companies. If you want to improve your credit, it’s better that you do it on your own without relying others to do it on your behalf.

3. Consolidating your debts by transferring your balances into a single card – As mentioned earlier, the scoring system actually looks at the gap between the balance and the total credit limit on each card and also on all your cards put together. It’s always better that you maintain small balances on a number of cards.

4. Requesting your credit card company to reduce your credits – The credit scoring system is affected by the gap between the credit that you t use and the available credit that you are able to use. It means that having a high balance in your account can actually narrow the gap – hence, contributing the negative effect to your score. Same applies to lowering your credit limits, if you have difficulties to maintain low balance in your account, the FICO scoring system sees less gap between your balance and your credit limit which can hurt your report.

5. Adding a 100-word statement to your file -Basically, the scoring system does not recognize the 100-word statement which explains the problem and in fact, that’s not very helpful in improving your credit report. You can stop thinking of adding the 100-word statement and start spending most of your quality time to focus on other solid ways to rebuild credit.

By realizing the common mistakes above, you can possibly rebuild your credit fast and effectively.

It is important to understand the appropriate ways to fix bad credit as credit rebuilding is not an overnight process – it would probably take months to see effective results. Hence, you can possibly rebuild your bad credit by getting free tips on how to fix bad credit via http://FixBadCreditFast.org