Your credit score impacts many aspects of your life. Your credit score can influence your ability to get a credit card, quality for a mortgage, or get a car loan. It can also influence your car insurance rates and your utility deposit rates when setting up service. It can impact your ability to get a job. With such far-reaching effects, it is essential to take care of your credit score. If you have a poor credit score, there are steps you can take to repair your credit.

#1: Look at Your Report

The first thing you will want to do is request a copy of your credit report. Remember, there are three different credit reporting bureaus, and they often have different information on them, and calculate your credit scores a little differently. That is why you are going to want to get all three reports. You need to know what your credit report is before you can work to repair it.

#2: Dispute Negative Marks

If you have a negative mark on your credit report, you will want to dispute those, especially if they are in error. You can dispute negative reports on your credit score online directly with each credit reporting bureau. The internet has made it much simpler to dispute negative marks and get them removed from your credit report. Once you enter a dispute, keep in mind that the credit bureau has to invest your claim and decide about it.

#3: Dispute Late Payments

A late payment is a little different than a wrongly reported debt, but it can be just as essential to dispute. You can use the same process as disputing a negative mark on your credit score to dispute a late payment. Paying your debts on time greatly impacts your credit score, so getting any wrongly reported late payments off your report can go a long way towards repairing your credit score. Do this with all inaccurately reported information on your report.

#4: Dispute Valid Negative Information

You can also dispute information that you know is correct, but you know it is negatively impacting your credit score. Once you dispute something, the agency has to investigate it, and if the other party doesn't respond to their investigation, the mark can be removed from your credit report.

On the other hand, if they verify the information is correct, no harm is done. The info just stays on your credit report. But suppose the creditor doesn't respond to the dispute. In that case, the credit agency will then remove the information from your credit report, which means you could potentially get rid of accurate negative information.

#5: Reach Out to Creditors

Finally, if you have a late payment, negative comment, or a paid as agreed mark on an account, you can reach out to the creditor to get that information removed from your credit report. If you have resolved your issues with that creditor many times, if you just ask them to remove the information from your report, they will agree to do so. Once again, it doesn't hurt to ask.

Reach out to a credit counseling professional for more help.