Credit score help: Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are all important. - Help.com

There’s lots of factors that go into your credit score…making payments on time is important, but other things (such as how much of your credit is used)is also important.

Also, these days your ability to repay might be weighed more than your actual credit score.

I would try to get some ‘face time’ with the person in charge of renting out the apartment. If necessary, you might be able to explain why your credit score is low, and how you won’t forget to pay your rent…

It’s not terrible but it’s not good either. It definitely could be a lot worse. Try to stay current with your bills and make sure all of the accounts that you have closed off or in collections are not in arrears. The fastest way to boost your credit score is to become a signer or someone with good credit’s card. But be careful because that could be potentially damaging to your credit also. If you do that make sure the person is responsible and that you don’t mess up their credit either by paying what you owe late.

I read a great article on credit scores and how it is analyzed. I’ll try to find it for you.

http://www.creditinfocenter.com/repai…

Your credit is not very good, but not awful. The best thing you can do for it in the short term is to keep making your payments on time. Opening new accounts generally hurts your score in the short term, and carrying a balance hurts it more. There are other techniques to improve your credit score in the medium to long term, but some of them are risky if you are not adept at managing your money. Focus on making your payments on time.

If your credit is a problem for your potential landlord, offer to make a larger damage deposit (such as two month’s rent instead of one) to reduce their exposure to your financial problems. This both demonstrates your sincerity and limits how much they can lose if you stop paying your rent.

By the way, I’m a fan of MyFico, which is a credit monitoring program that you renew annually. It allows you to see one of your three FICO scores at any time all year, and includes a couple of credit reports that are much more organized than the free ones. Most of the information available on this site is available for free, but the continuous monitoring and alerts when anything changes can be helpful in helping you understand how your actions affect your credit.

http://www.myfico.com/

tjwoods wrote:
By the way, I’m a fan of MyFico, which is a credit monitoring program that you renew annually. It allows you to see one of your three FICO scores at any time all year, and includes a couple of credit reports that are much more organized than the free ones. Most of the information available on this site is available for free, but the continuous monitoring and alerts when anything changes can be helpful in helping you understand how your actions affect your credit.http://www.myfico.com/

To clarify my last post — MyFico is not free, and there are places to get for free a lot of the general education that they offer about credit. I don’t think that you can get the same continuous monitoring and alerts about changes to your credit report for free anywhere, although other similar fee-based monitoring services exist.