If you are needing a credit pick me up, then you have come to the right place. Everyone needs to take time to manage their credit, and make sure that it is as good as it can be. This article will give you ideas on how you can clean up your bad credit and maintain the good credit.

If you have a credit rating that is less than 640 than it may be best for you to rent a home instead of trying to buy one. This is because any lender that will give you a loan with a credit rating like that will most likely charge you a large amount of fees and interest.

Nothing will repair your credit other than time. If you have late payments, defaults or even bankruptcy, your score will go down. There is no way to remove these once they have been reported. Only time and good behavior will eventually make them less and less of a determining factor in your score and the credit that you receive.

To make sure your credit score improves, avoid new late payments. New late payments count for more than past late payments -- specifically, the most recent 12 months of your credit history is what counts the most. The more late payments you have in your recent history, the worse your credit score will be. Even if you can't pay off your balances yet, make payments on time.

When repairing your credit, it can help to actually use your credit card more often for smaller purchases. Having positive activity on your account will be reflected in your credit score. Use your credit card for small daily purchases, with the understanding that you'll be able to pay the entire debt off in full each month.

If you are trying to repair your credit on your own, and you have written to all three credit bureaus to have wrong or negative items removed from your report without it being successful, just keep trying! While you may not get immediate results, your credit will get better if you persevere to get the results you want.

One of the things that you can do in order to get a good credit score is to keep track of your credit card statements very carefully. Be sure to check for errors that credit card companies make. For example, if they charge you for a late payment that did not happen, this could lower your credit score. Be sure to report this mistake immediately.

An important tip to consider when working to repair your credit, is to only apply for a loan when you are almost certain that you will be approved. This is important because you may lessen the chances of getting approved in the future if you are rejected.

If you have many credit cards and are looking to improve or repair your credit, you should pay off the credit cards in order of their credit utilization. Credit utilization is basically the percentage of credit you have used. For example, if you have a balance of $500 on a credit card with a $1000 limit, your credit utilization would be 50 percent. Ideally, you will want your credit utilization to be under 30 percent on all of your cards. Having a low percentage will improve your credit score.

Hopefully at the end of this article you are seeing just how easy it can be to maintain a good credit rating and to clean up a not so good one. There was a lot of information presented here, but if you follow it and make smart financial decisions, you will be limitless in possibilities.