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When you need to improve your credit score and do it fast, it won't a bit tricky. There are various factors that can affect your credit score recovery time, and your starting point is usually one of them. Depending on your current credit history health, it can take as few as three months to see some positive changes, or you will not see any improvements until after six months.
If you have no credit history or have short history of using credit products, it will be easier for you to increase your credit score. On the other hand, if you once had good credit and damaged it or filed a bankruptcy, it will be harder to rebuild your credit.
As you may know, your FICO credit score is determined based on a formula that considers five primary factors: payment history, credit utilization (or amounts of debt), length of credit history, credit mix, new credit. The payment history is the most important factor, while credit mix and new credits contribute the smallest part to your credit score.
If you want to boost your credit score, the process usually begins with evaluating your situation and starting to make consistent, timely payments every month. The time it takes to increase your credit score depends on your individual situation: financial habits, initial cause of your low score, and where you currently stand. There are some average timelines to increase your scores from poor to fair credit based on the financial hardships.
Here are some estimates to recover from poor credit to fair credit:
- Bankruptcy: it can take 6 plus years to improve your credit.
- Missed/defaulted payments: you will need a year and half of consistent monthly payments made on time.
- Late mortgage payment: it will take a bit less than a year to recover from a late payment on your mortgage.
- Applying for a new credit card: while it's hard to say how your credit score will change after opening a new credit account, but if it goes down, you will generally need three months to bring your credit back to where it was.
Again, those are only approximate time lengths, and the actual time to recover from bad credit to fair and to good credit will depend on your specific situation and your determination to improve your credit score. When you have some derogatory marks on your credit reports (like bankruptcy, late payments, debt collections, foreclosures) it will take time for them to fall out of your credit report. However, things are not that bad. The older those "bad" records get, the less they affect your credit score. So, if you stick to the habit of making all monthly payments on time and use only 30% of your available credit, you will eventually be able to improve your credit score.