Have you applied for a loan or a credit card only to have your application rejected with the remark poor Credit Rating? You need to act fast to rectify this.

Here is what you can do.

Pick the phone

You may think that you have no other recourse but to pay off your balances in order to get your credit rating out of the red.

While this is partially true, there are other ways to facilitate this process.  And they're right on the back of your credit card.

So now, you can talk to your credit card company on the phone. Find out if they will give you a better interest rate. It's so easy, and saves so much of your hard-earned
cash, it's hard not to smile. It works well as long as you have been making regular payments on time and it's a great way to set your credit straight. But do keep in mind that if you have been somewhat lagging on the checks you send to them, they might not want to reduce the rate so readily.

Ask for your free credit report

New laws now allow you to get one free credit report per year, so why not take advantage of this?  You can go through Experian and Equifax to get this report.  You want to check to see if you recognize all of the credit that you have.  If you don't recognize some of the accounts, you'll want to look into seeing what they are.

Why? Because you need to be careful about Identity theft -- it's getting simpler to do. At the same time, it is difficult to pick up. You may not even know what is going on
till your credit goes bad. You are going to have to take it up with the credit card company, of course. But first, you need to look at straightening the credit.

You will want to file charges with the police and the social security administration in order to have a paper trail of the work that you've done to dispute the issue.  Talk with
the credit agencies to see what kinds of steps they recommend.

You will want to shut down the fraudulent accounts with all of the agencies that keep records of the credit scores.  And you also want to check all of the agencies because sometimes an account is on one, but not on the other.

Once you have done all this, just make sure you have put your account on a fraud watch-list. Putting a fraud watch will help to stop any one using your name to open fraudulent accounts again.

Getting your credit rating back up out of the red is a lengthy but essential process to ensure that you get the larger loans for a car or house in the future without paying
exorbitant rates of interest.


About the author:

Frank Cransworth operates the website http://www.yrcredit.com which is a site dedicated to researching Credit related topics and contains all the very latest Credit news and views.