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It can happen to anyone: Miss just a credit card payment or two and the next time you check your credit score, you’re stunned to find a low number that makes lenders shun you.

But with patience and discipline, you can move that score from the depths to the stratosphere.

We talked to several people across the country who dug themselves out and brought up their credit scores in a big way — sometimes in just one or two years.

We asked them to pass along their best tips to share with folks who might be dealing with the low-score blues.

Melissa Chinwah
Homewood, Ill.
Credit score before: 348
Credit score after: 702

Tips for Maintaining a Good Credit Score

Credit score danger zone

Rock bottom: After getting divorced, Chinwah, an office manager, was shocked to find that her credit score had sunk to an average of 348, with the lowest reported score among the three bureaus at just 316. There were 43 collections and a repossessed car on her report — “Not one thing was positive, except for my student loan,” she said. “I started to look for housing for me and my two small children and no one would even look at me.”

Turning point: Melissa started researching the ins and outs of her credit report on the forums at MyFICO.com, where people shared their tips for raising their credit scores. For example, she learned that being 120 days late on a payment is basically the same as being repossessed, according to a credit bureau. “The average layperson doesn’t know these kinds of things,” she said.

Her motivation: “The motivation was I needed a place to live,” she said. “I was 44 years old at the time, and I had to start all over anyway.” When Melissa’s credit score reached 648, she applied for a mortgage and bought her dream house.

Lessons learned: Melissa approached building her credit like a part-time job. “Every day I would promise myself I would look at my score on my lunch break, and I would make myself do something, like write a goodwill letter,” she said. Melissa wrote a lot of letters and made phone calls to lenders after paying her debts, asking them to remove blemishes from her report. She was persistent in her efforts over the course of two years and was successful in getting at least 15 collections removed.

Her best advice: “Patience is one thing you must have,” she said. “There’s no magic pill, no magic wand. You have to sit down, make those phone calls and pay your bills.”

Paul Seago
Apopka, Fla.
Credit score before: Less than 500
Credit score after: 785

Rock bottom: “I got out of graduate school in 1998. By 1999 and 2000, paying bills on time wasn’t that important to me, so they’d pile up,” said Seago. “And I’d be 30 days late or 60, sometimes 90. A couple of those piled up. All the sudden I thought, ‘Look, I’m going to want to buy a car someday, get married and buy a house.’ I couldn’t do those kinds of things with the score I had.”

Turning point: “One of the first things I did was start paying everything on time,” said Seago, president of the Apopka Area Chamber of Commerce. “I set up a auto bill pay so I’d never be late again. The easiest thing to do is start paying your bills on time. The late payments came off eventually. Then I’d pay extra on my bills — more than the minimum — so my debt ratio would go down. I got rid of all my store cards and kept all my major credit cards.”

His motivation: “I just buckled down and wanted to get [my score] turned around,” he said. “At some point, I’d be married and looking at a house, and I could just see that played out someday, sitting down with a mortgage broker looking at my credit and [the broker] saying, ‘Yeah, you can’t have a house.’ I probably looked at my score every four months, and I’d see it go up. It’s like when you’re dieting and you see yourself losing a bit of weight.” Seago is now married and in the process of looking for a house.

Lessons learned: Seago researched credit score advice online and in magazines. His major focus was on making payments on time. “If you find yourself in trouble and you’ve got a low score, you can’t spend your way out of it,” he said.

His best advice: “No. 1, as simple as it sounds, is just pay on time. Pay a little bit extra every month to get that balance down. And don’t get any more cards. Do whatever you’ve got to do to pay them off and