Want to Raise Your Credit Score Amazingly Fast? Read This Reddit Post Now
Want to Raise Your Credit Score Amazingly Fast? Read This Reddit Post Now
Prykhodov/iStock; reddit.com
Who would’ve thought that Reddit—that vast black hole of off-the-rail rants and jaw-dropping photos—could actually show you a path to raise your credit score fast? Well, some users on the site claim to have found the secret sauce to achieving such a feat. Case in point: Reddit member Brokerstoker’s much-buzzed-about post, “I raised my credit score from 546 to 720 in 4 months.”
So what’s Brokerstoker’s secret?
‘I wanted to buy a home, but felt helpless’
Brokerstoker, whose actual name is Chris Collins, didn’t always know the nuances of credit scores, but got a rude wake-up call after getting engaged in January.
“I wanted to buy a house and start a family,” the 27-year-old medical device salesman in Orlando, FL, told realtor.com®.
Collins knew that his credit score—the numerical representation of how well he’d paid off past debts—was critical to the home-buying process. But he didn’t know just how bad his own score was. At 546, Collins not only would never qualify for a mortgage, he also didn’t even qualify to open a credit card of any kind, given how much he’d botched accounts in the past.
“I was basically laughed out of the bank,” he recalls. “They said my credit score was so bad I wouldn’t qualify for a card for years.”
Courtesy of Chris Collins
At that time, Collins’ debts had snowballed to about $20,000 because of some previous medical expenses.
“I felt helpless,” he recalls. “Collection agencies were harassing me and even my mother, threatening they’d put in jail if she didn’t pay up.”
So Collins dove into the internet for solutions and stumbled across a Reddit thread from a member who’d outlined how he’d boosted his credit score 73 points in three months.
Collins decided to try the advice himself, enrolling with CreditKarma.com to see who had filed claims against him. From there, he added his own moves to the Reddit playbook: Rather than just fire off a flurry of emails that sit in oft-neglected inboxes, he sat down, picked up the phone, and called each collector to strike a deal.
“I told these collection agencies, ‘I’ll give you half, or nothing at all,’” Collins recalls. “It was aggressive, but I’m a salesman, so I knew how to talk to them.”
And it worked: Collins managed to whittle down the $20,000 he owed to around $8,800. From there, he paid off the majority of his debts with $5,000 he had in savings and the rest through short-term payment plans.
Within a few weeks, Collins was amazed to see his credit score shoot up.
“In 30 days my score had gone from 546 to 620,” he says. In four months, his score rose to 720. He’d eliminated his entire debt, acquired a credit card—and even made his family proud along the way.
“I called my mom and joked that my credit score is now higher than hers,” Collins says.
Within 24 hours of posting his tale on Reddit—along with a lengthy bullet-point list of his tactics—he’d received 14,000 comments.
Courtesy of Chris Collins
The credit score ‘crash diet’
Most experts say you really can boost your credit score quickly if you just buckle down and do it.
“This is absolutely possible,” says Ryan Fitzgerald of Raleigh Realty. “One of my clients had something similar happen where his score was in the high 500s and turned it into a 720 in 90 days. His mortgage lender admitted that he’d never seen anything like it.”
But not everyone recommends that most folks follow in Collins’ footsteps.
“I liken this to a crash diet,” says Ian Atkins, finance analyst and writer for Fit Small Business. “Is it possible to lose 100 pounds in four months? Sure. But you have to be 100 pounds overweight to begin with. You’ll then need to go to extreme measures to achieve that loss. And the big question remains: Did you change the behaviors that lead to 100 pounds of weight gain to begin with? Or did you do a quick and temporary fix?”
Collins, for one, admits that raising his credit score took a sizable amount of time and effort—about three hours a day over four months calling creditors, tracking down claims, negotiating debts. But now that he’s debt-free, he is committed to staying that way, and helping others see the light.
“I want to pay it forward,” he says. “I want to show people that you really can improve your credit in a short time if you really try.”
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