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Landing with bad credit is bad enough. You don't want to make more mistakes when you are already in a precarious situation. But most people do make mistakes. Most of these mistakes happen because most people want to find the easy way out of trouble. But if that were possible, there wouldn't be a need for a credit score as everyone would have gotten rid of their bad credits. The road to a good credit score is longer and harder, but it is the only genuine way of climbing up the ladder. Every other way is fake and dubious and will land you into more trouble at some point of time.
The first mistake that you do even before you start your attempt to repair your credit is to hire a credit repair company. The credit repair companies often make lofty promises but achieve very little legally. Why would you then want to waste more money in an already crunch situation? The second mistake you can think of doing is transferring your balance and closing an existing credit card. This will leave you with a zero credit history and in a worse position than before. Secondly, the card to which you transfer the balance might not be the appropriate one.
Many people get lured by the 0% interest rate in the intro term. They are not sure about the intro term and fail to read the terms and conditions that usually mention in fine print that those with a bad credit get an intro term shorter than most people. This may lead to a double problem. Firstly you have lost your credit history. Secondly, you are paying an even higher interest rate in this case than the former.
One must realize that if your debt climbs over half of the credit limit, then your credit score starts going down further. In this case, if you take up a new credit card, with a lower credit limit and close the older card, you might end up lowering your credit score further. Therefore balance transfers hardly ever work unless you are very careful.
Missing some payments for others is a bad tactic too. If you have more than one card, the best way to go is closing the debt one with the highest interest. Keeping the accounts open is always a smart thing because the longer the credit history, the better it is for you. Making regular monthly payments and paying off the debts is a smarter way than transferring one account to another and so on.
Another common mistake people do is dispute a lot of items on the credit report. This doesn't go too well with the credit bureau who might close your dispute. You should instead try to focus on those items which are worth disputing. Similarly, all correspondence to the credit bureau should be through certified mail that has an attached receipt, so that you always have the proof of correspondence with them. To top them all, not checking your credit report as much as possible is the biggest mistake and risk.
