If youre credit challenged and need to raise your business or personal credit score in the quickest amount of time, I would strongly recommend that you employ a legitimate credit repair service (yes, they do exist) and get a guaranteed merchandise card. Ill explain what this kind of card is shortly. Anyway, whether you use a legitimate credit repair company or do your own credit repair you cant go wrong. Why? Because various studies over the years have documented very high error rates among the credit bureaus, which translates into the high probability that your own credit file contains erroneous information. In fact, a 2004 study found that 79% of all credit reports contain errors of one kind or another! So credit repair is a no-brainer when it comes time to decide on what one should do first. And as I mentioned earlier sub-prime merchandise cards will be the other book-end of your new effective strategy, building your credit score in the two ways, which Ill outline below.

Sub-Prime Merchandise Cards represent the single most cost-effective way for consumers (and businesses) to add positive accounts to their credit files for fast credit score boosting while at the same time lowering their debt-to-credit ratio. Lowering ones debt-to-credit ratio is without doubt one of the most effective ways to accomplish credit score repair or even to build your business credit fast. These cards provide you the business owner with a valuable, unsecured and revolving business line of credit. When used along with legitimate credit repair (do-it-yourself or using a credit repair company) you kill two birds with one stone by removing negative items from your credit report while adding positive ones.

Basically, a sub-prime merchandise card is a credit card which is to be used exclusively with a particular merchant or through that merchants on or offline catalogs. Sub-Prime (Guaranteed) Merchandise Cards work very simply and in the following manner: the company provides you with a card holding a $2,500 to $25,000 credit line and does so with no credit check and no cosigner. The amount of your purchase determines the amount of the credit line you receive. This occurs after you make an initial merchandise purchase from that companys catalog.

Once you are approved (the approval process is very easy) you charge a minimal amount on your card to activate it and are then given a liberal (nominal) repayment schedule to pay back the amount charged on your card. Please note that a legitimate company will then report your payment history to at least one of the major credit bureaus. Just be sure to check to see that they in fact report to one of these bureaus. Heres how you do this. if the merchant is not clear and concise in its advertising (on or offline) about credit bureau reporting, you should not deal with them.

Ill now move on to the benefits of how to build credit using a sub-prime (guaranteed) merchandise card. Sub-prime (guaranteed) merchandise cards are credit cards for folks with challenged credit or no credit, and are the single most cost effective (and powerful) tool for businesses and consumers to increase their high credit limit and decrease their debt-to-credit ratio. Debt-to-credit ratio is the amount you owe in relation to your credit limit. So if you owe $6000.00 and have a credit limit of $10,000, your debt-to-income ratio is 60%, which is way too high! A debt-to-income ratio this high will surely lower your credit score. Lowering your debt-to-income ratio to say, 30% is much better and will give you a much higher score. Using a Sub-Prime Merchandise Card will go a long way toward accomplishing this for you.

On the other hand, paying off your bills in full each month is wrongly thought of by most people to be a best practice. But this is not at all true. Bankers and credit card companies actually prefer that you NOT pay off your debt in this manner because they dont get to charge you interest when you pay off all of your debt in full and on time. The bottom line is that you have to strike a balance between owing too much and too little. As I mentioned earlier, 30% is a very good debt-to-income ratio and will RAISE your credit score. I know, it sounds counterintuitive. But when you consider how banks and credit card companies make their money from interest charges it makes perfect sense.