Your credit rating can go up and down. One week you can be a lender’s dream; the next your rating can look quite different so it’s important you look after your credit rating.

If your rating isn’t currently where you think it should be, there are some things you can do to give it a boost.

  1. Ensure you are on the electoral roll – Credit reference agencies use your electoral roll information to confirm your identity. If you’re not on the electoral roll at your current address it’ll count against you. This takes about 5 minutes to rectify on the Gov website.
  2. Manage your credit balances – Lenders want to see that you’re a safe pair of hands when it comes to credit. They’ll look to make sure you are regularly paying down any existing balances. If you aren’t, this will tend to count against you. Consider setting up a direct debit to clear a sensible amount (or ideally all) of your balance each month.
  3. Close unused cards – This one needs balance. It’s a good thing to have ‘low credit utilisation’ i.e. only using 10% of the credit limits you have available to you. However, it’s a bad thing to have too much credit exposure as lenders will not want to add more credit availability to someone who has lots already. Think about closing down cards you no longer need.
  4. Get rid of ‘Lazy Debt’ – When lenders look at your credit score they’ll take into consideration all debt you hold, including things like overdrafts. It can be easy to forget about smaller debts especially if there are no defined repayment terms (overdrafts for example). Having a debt that you’re not proactively managing isn’t a good thing. Try and limit or remove these kinds of debts.
  5. Check your credit report for instances of fraud – use one of the free credit report sites listed here to check your credit report throughly. If you see a credit agreement or payment that looks amiss raise it with the credit reference agency as quickly as possible.