If you are looking to increase your credit score to purchase a new home or car in the near future, then there are several things you can do to help ensure that your credit score goes up. First and foremost is to have a stable home; all this means is not to move around from place to place a lot. After you have this stable home that you plan on staying at for a while, register to vote; it is amazing how being a registered voter can assist in you credit score.

You also need to remember, that if you are trying to get a credit card or even a car loan, do not just go from place to place applying for a loan. Each time you apply for a loan or even a credit card, these lenders and institutions make a query to the crediting agencies, if there are too many in any given time period, your credit rating may go down. If you have done this in the past, you probably would have noticed that at the first place, they said that you were eligible for “X” amount, but by the time you got to the last place, you were eligible for maybe half that amount. Each time they check your rating, it drops.

If you are planning on going from place to place, then simply ask for a quotation search as these will not affect your rating like a credit search will. Unfortunately, if you are applying for a credit card, in most cases you will not have the opportunity to request this style search.

If you are rejected for a line of credit regardless if it is a credit card or a car loan, check your rating only once, if you check too much as I stated before it will adversely affect your score. If you are applying for a credit card online, and you are rejected, wait a while before applying again. If you had previous cards in the past, make sure that the credit card agency knows that they are cancelled.

As a general rule of thumb, it only takes 6 months to greatly improve your credit. If you do not currently have any credit, then you are better off, applying for a credit card and using it to pay for your daily gasoline usage, but just remember to pay it off at the end of the month in full and not to be late.

If you follow all of the suggestions as stated above over a 6 month period, in most cases you will have improved your credit rating substantially. Who knows, if you get one little credit card now, by this time next year, you could be sitting behind the wheel of a shiny new car.