1. Request your free copy of your current credit for. Federal law mandates that every person is entitled to one free copy of their credit report from each of the three major credit reporting agencies each year. Everyone should take advantage of this and stay current with what is on their credit report. This way you can be proactive and quickly remove any items any accuracies (which are more common than you think).

2. Buy a credit repair guide, read through it thoroughly to get a “big picture” view of the credit repair process. There are several guides available, and one in particular called “Credit Secrets Bible” is probably the most popular one. It is written by experts in the credit repair business. This guide shows you step-by-step how to go about analyzing your credit report and improving your credit score quickly.

3. Avoid companies that make promises of improving your credit score for a fee. There’s nothing that these companies can do that you can’t do yourself as long as you have the proper knowledge. You can easily obtain this knowledge by using the “Credit Secrets Bible” mentioned previously. The vast majority of companies that claim they will improve your credit score by a certain amount basically are preying on individuals either don’t want to take the time and effort to improve your credit score or think they have a choice because the system is overly complicated and they would never be able to understand it. These are both erroneous assumptions.

4. Once you are armed with your credit report and a good guidebook on how to analyze and start to improve your credit score, take action. The first time you go through this process it may be a fair amount of work if your credit score is low and you haven’t ever gone through the process before. These days, a “low” credit score is anything below 600. It does you no good to get your credit report, in a guidebook, and then do nothing with it. So be sure you are ready to put some effort into this because in the long run it will be well worth the time you spent on and if you do it each year the entire process shouldn’t take more than a few hours.

The above four simple steps should keep your credit score stable and allow you to take advantage of more attractive interest rates, or even get loans that others can’t get, because of their poor credit scores. So remember, repairing your credit score is not difficult process just takes the test of time and effort but will pay off big dividends with your ability to borrow money attractive interest rates.

Here are the most common mistakes people make when going about the process of trying to improve your credit score:

1. If you haven’t requested your free credit report recently, it’s important that you do so. Law mandates that you are entitled to one free credit report each year. A law was passed so three years ago that gave consumers the right to see their credit report upon request at no charge one time per year. Taking this simple step can go a long way to making sure your credit report always accurate. Viewing your credit report only after you have been denied credit doesn’t help you. It only starts the process of figuring out how to improve your credit.

2. Consumers who do request a credit report usually do not know how to go about fixing things on a credit report and will just pick up the phone and start making phone calls to all the companies that have reported derogatory entries (a derogatory entry is a negative entry on your report that indicates a problem area). Next to each entry on your credit report is a phone number that you can call to the company reported the derogatory entry. And let you know how to go about talking to these people, they are have the advantage because they deal with people going about their credit reports every day. Companies that report derogatory credit entries need to be approached in a certain way in order to get those derogatory entries removed. There are some basic do’s and don’ts of what consumers should do.

3. Another mistake consumers commonly make is allowing companies to make excessive inquiries to the credit reporting agencies on their credit. Most people don’t know it but each time an inquiry is made, your credit score is reduced by a small amount. If you have problem areas on your credit report, the more inquiries you make to try to fix these credit problems lower your score will be. Of course that may not be the case for any particular individual, but statistically it is true that people who have excessive inquiries on their credit report usually also have poor credit. There will be a listing on your credit report of every inquiry made. you should use the listing on your credit report of all the inquiries made to verify that the inquiry was valid and has your approval.

4. The fourth common mistake that people make regarding their credit report is not staying on top of it each year in making sure that all of the entries on the report are accurate. Once you do the initial cleanup of your credit report, an annual review is a fairly straightforward and fast process. This is because you already know your way around the credit industry and are able to take corrective action quickly and correctly. Plus, there should be fewer derogatory entries on your credit report as you are presumably going to be more careful with your credit the more you know about it.

Consumers who are proactive about how to improve credit score can have a much easier time and many more opportunities to borrow money at attractive interest rates even when the economy is poor such as it is today. For example, there are many very attractive real estate investments one can make with the depressed real estate market right now. However, if you have poor credit your chances of getting loans make any real estate investments are slim to none as banks have tightened the restrictions so much that only the very best credit scores are able to acquire credit.