Cheat No. 4: Spread your debt around
The FICO formula looks at how much of your total available credit you're using, but it also looks at the credit utilization of each individual account. A big balance on a single card can hurt you more than the same debt distributed over several cards.
So spread your debt around. You don't want to open a bunch of accounts at once, because that can hurt your scores, but see if you can transfer some of your debt to your other cards.
Caveat: Your ultimate goal should be to pay off your debt, not keep moving it around. And if you've already maxed out all your cards, it's way too late for this tip; you should be talking to a legitimate credit counselor (you can get referrals from the National Foundation for Credit Counseling) and a bankruptcy attorney (referrals from the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys).
Cheat No. 5: 'Bribe' your creditors
The FICO formula treats a collection account as a "severe negative derogatory," in credit-scoring parlance. That means "seriously bad news" for your credit scores.
Many collection agencies, however, can be persuaded to wipe a collection from your credit reports with the right motivation. That means cash.
This is a technique called "pay for deletion," where the borrower settles the debt, usually with a lump-sum payment, in exchange for its deletion as a collection account.
You may not have to pay 100 cents on the dollar to settle the debt, because chances are good the collection agency paid only a few pennies on the dollar to buy it. But whatever deal you negotiate, make sure to get the agency's promise -- in advance and in writing -- that the account will be deleted from your credit files and that the collection agency won't sell any unpaid portion of the debt to another collector. (You may wind up with a tax bill for any "forgiven" portion of the debt, however.)
Caveat: Erasing a collection account won't erase what the original creditor has to say about you. If the account was charged off before it was turned over to collections, for example, the charge-off will remain on your credit reports and have a larger negative impact on your scores than the collection did. But even so, getting rid of the collection certainly won't hurt your scores and could help them considerably.
