Whenever people ask me how to rebuild your credit I always feel like what they are really asking me is how long does it take to rebuild your credit. The first question I can answer easily and I will in this article. The second answer depends entirely upon your own personal credit history and how hard you work to fix it. I’ll try to give you some estimates on time frames however, so that you can have somewhat of an idea how long it actually takes to rebuild your credit from having a poor credit score, to having one that will allow you to purchase a car, home or get a conventional credit card with a decent credit limit on it.

If you want to know how to rebuild you credit fast then you should know that fast is relative. For me, because I know what is involved in rebuilding credit, fast is a year or two. However, some people expect miracles when rebuilding bad credit and want the whole process to take about ten days. Let me tell you right now that this is impossible. So if you are asking me how to rebuild my credit, and you are asking how fast it will be to rebuild credit score information on your credit reports then keep in mind that rebuilding takes hard work, and it takes a bit of time.

Your first step is wiping the bad credit from your report. The first thing you need to do is try to take care of anything that has the date of last activity within the past year. This is the debt that is  hurting you the most. Get some money saved up, and then you can call up each creditor one at a time, and try to negotiate for complete removal from your credit history. Many will do it and some will not. However, before you do that, you should look over your report and dispute any inaccurate information. I don’t mean just the amount being wrong or debt that isn’t yours, but any information that is even a tiny bit wrong.

The reason that I’m telling you to dispute inaccuracies is because if you dispute a listing on your credit history and the credit bureau cannot get the company that listed it to verify it within thirty days, they will remove it from your credit report. Many companies simply don’t have the time to look up this information and several of your inaccurate listings will get removed. After that you can work on paying off what is left. Anything that is five years old or older leave, because it will be falling off of your report fairly soon anyway. Disregard this advice if the item in question is a student loan. They will never fall off your report until you pay them.

The last step once you have a clean or almost clean credit history is to begin rebuilding. You can start the process by getting a secured credit card and paying for it each month. Charge a few dollars to the card and then pay it off promptly so that you show a good payment, but you don’t get into debt. Whatever you do don’t default on the card, because this is your chance to begin rebuilding and good credit has a snowball effect. The more good credit you have the more you can get and the larger and more expensive items you can begin to finance.