How can I improve my credit scores?

[debtfighter]

I started trying to improve my credit in June 2012. I just disputed an account from ERC on Feb 5 and the account was deleted from Equifax and Experian credit reports. I now have clean credit reports. Very happy about this. 

I started with scores in low 500's. I now have 670 equifax, 705 Transunion, 678 experian. ALL FICO scores. I have 18 inquiries on transunion, 6 equifax, and 6 experian. Inquiries were from car shopping last march, didn't know that they did that many pulls when buying my car. I had a 560 score and a couple of paid accounts at the time of car purchase. I just refinanced that autoloan from 10.99% to 3.44% through local credit union. I might be co-signing on a car for daughter in april. We are going to put a lot of money down for car. Looking at financing only about 5000.

Do you think I should try to get a personal loan at credit union or finance the $5000 for the car at dealership or credit union?

Anything I can do to improve credit scores besides getting uitilization down. I am at 13% because I purchased furniture at 0% for 12 months. I should be down to 4% by april when we buy car. Want to get best rate for car possible.

[Anonymous]

Do you know what your auto scores are or the scores your CU would use? With CU financing in hand, you would avoid all the dealer pulls but with good scores, you might be able to get a better rate with the dealers captive lender depending on what you are buying.

I wouldn't take out a personal loan (typically unsecured), the rate would be higher than an auto loan (secured).

[Anonymous]

You made a good decision by refinacing your car with a credit union.  My suggestion is to use that credit union for your daughter also.  Just tell them what you are trying to accomplish and they will point you in the right direction.  A personal loan will have much higher interest and will be harder to qualify for so I would do a car loan.  DCU is popular here so they are also an option.

I disagree with the post that says you might get better rates with a capitive lender, that is true for folks with high FICO scores but very rarely the case for anyone who does not. I think I have seen a captive lender beat a credit union on someone with scores under the lower 700's maybe a couple of times.

As long as you don't have collections or other negatives that you can get removed or are scheduled to fall off your not likely to get a big bump in scores in the short term, the only exception is reducing utliization on credit cards but the lender will look at the auto scores so that probably won't help.  

Call your credit union and see what they have to say, they clearly are ok with your scores as they set otherwise they wouldnt have recently financed you so not sure you need anything more than you already have.