Steps to Credit Repair for Women: Building a Credit History
A Credit Article Contributed by Brandie King
Understand Why You May Need to Start over with Your Credit History
You've recently divorced and now you are going to have to take steps to repair your credit, whether you realize it yet or not.
Did you change your name back to your maiden name after your divorce? Maybe your husband had a gas company credit card, department store card, or some other type of card, and you paid the bills on his accounts because you used the cards more.
What you might not yet realize is that the above situations can both cause you to have no credit history built up. If you changed back to your maiden name your credit history disappeared right along with your married name. And sure you were paying the bills on your husbands credit cards, but you were paying them for accounts that had HIS name on them, not yours. In both instances you will need to build a credit history of your own, and that means starting from scratch.
Steps to Credit Repair: Joint Accounts
The first step to credit repair that you need to do take is to cancel any joint credit card accounts that you and your husband shared. The debt itself will not disappear, but cancelling the accounts will prevent any further use and/or abuse of them. Just leaving the accounts unpaid or at the mercy of your ex-husband can wreak havoc with your credit report.
Steps to Credit Repair: Individual Accounts You Had under Your Married Name
Here is the second step to credit repair. If you had any accounts under your married name that were your own individual accounts, you need to call the creditors associated with those accounts and notify them of your name change to your maiden name. In this way you can preserve the credit history you built up by having those individual accounts and will not lose it just because you decided to go back to your maiden name.
Steps to Credit Repair: Build New Credit
As a third step to repairing your credit you need to build new credit. You can begin to build new credit by applying for credit at your local bank or department stores. These type of places are often more lenient with their approval process. Just don't make the mistake of applying for too many accounts at one time. Every time you apply for an account the creditor you are applying to makes a request for your credit report and causes an inquiry to show up on it.
When other places you apply for credit at see inquiries on your credit report and also see that you were denied credit regarding those inquiries, they begin to wonder why you were denied in the first place and are less likely to approve you.
Just make sure that you pay the bills on time for any cards or loans that you receive. Pay the full amount of the balance every month or pay more than the minimum due. At the very least pay the minimum amount due to keep the accounts from showing on your credit history as late pays.
