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In 6 months of inconsistency one can really damage his or her credit. Whether it is through inconsistency in paying the bills or getting late and missing the bill payment dues, you can lower your credit rating and hence bring down your creditworthiness too. If your outstanding bills are way too high to get interests accumulating very quickly and the outstanding gets way too close to the credit limit, your credit rating is likely to be hurt further. However bad your credit history could be, it is never too late to mend and you can always repair it with some commitment.
Get all your debt to one card
It is easy to miss bill payment deadlines if you have multiple cards and even worse, with varying interest rates. You can never really be sure which one to pay off first and which one the last. Although, balance transfers could hurt your credit history to some extent, they can also help you to prevent your credit history from worsening a lot as the interest rates keep accumulating on each of your cards. To get organized it is always good to have just one debt and always be sure what your outstanding overall debt it.
Talk to the credit card company
You can talk to the credit card company to set some sort of a payment plan through which you can pay off your outstanding dues slowly over a period of time. This will give you a good idea of how much is your target every month and how much you should spend on your card or save overall in order to make your target easily. In fact you can try debt consolidation where one credit card company takes up all your debt and sets you with a monthly payment plan.
Study your monthly credit card reports carefully
This will allow you to understand when your income is coming and where your expenditure is going. The monthly expense report will also show you where you could save some money possibly. Every expense cut down will help you clear the outstanding dues even quicker.
Do not miss your minimum payments
With the recent credit card reforms, credit card companies have to constantly inform the credit card customers how long it would take to pay off the outstanding if they consistently pay the minimum payment due as decided by the credit card issuer. This acts as double motivation, firstly to constantly see the improvement you are making and also to encourage you to pay more than the minimum payment to get the due off your back faster.
Pay more than monthly minimum payments
You can build a good credit history by consistently paying more than the monthly payment due on your credit card. By doing this over a period of time you can not only salvage your credit history to a great extent but also ensure that your interest rates go back to their original if they were raised in the recent past because of your late payments.