It is recommended to monitor your credit directly with the aforementioned 3 major credit bureas. Maintaining less than 35% of your credit limit will help you increase your scores.

Dont "max out" your credit lines. Since the size of the balance on your open accounts is a factor, lower balances are better.

It's said that by carefully managing your credit, it's possible to add as much as 50 points per year to your score.

The first thing you will want to do is obtain credit reports from each reporting bureau. The three bureaus are Trans union, Equifax and Experian. Separate credit reports will help you see what each bureau is reporting, while this can be seen a a tri merge report it is easier for the average individual to read separate reports.

The list of derogatory items is listed with the most negative at the top. By focusing on cleaning the top of the list, will provide the most change to your score.

Keep in mind that some mortgage professionals are also willing and able to assist you with this process. If they are not prepared to help you directly, they can often point you to sources and tools you can use to do this yourself.

By law, credit bureaus are required to provide consumers one free credit report per year. The three major credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion have set up a website, wwww.annualcreditreport.com, to provide such free report.

MyFICO.com is the best consumer website in terms of getting accurate scores to what your mortgage broker or lender will most likely pull. 99% of the time when my clients have pulled their myFICO.com scores it's within a point or two of what I actually pull, if within a few days of each other. CPPSAVINGS (as of 5/4/07) is a discount code that can be used to get the consumer reports at a discount.

Your credit can be monitored online. Any inaccuracy can be disputed directly with the credit agencies.