It takes patience and persistence to bulid good credit. If you pay your bills on time and keep your card balances low over the long haul, you’ll be rewarded with a solid score.

But what about quick fixes? Many of these tricks are scams. But there are a few sneaky ways to legitimately to boost your credit score. Here are a few ways to do it:

1. Ask credit card companies to increase your credit limits

Credit utilization, or how much of your available credit you’re using, affects 30% of your credit score. Many credit experts insist you keep your balances low if you want to increase your credit score. Asking your credit card issuers to increase your credit limits will benefit your credit score in the same way. The increase in available credit will automatically lower your credit utilization ratio. It is preferred that you keep your balance to less than 25% of your available credit.

2. Keep and use old cards occasionally

The length of time that you’ve had credit affects 15% of your credit score. The longer your credit history, the higher your score can be. Therefore, if you ever want to close some of your credit cards, you should choose to keep the credit cards with longer histories and close those newer ones. But credit cards that haven’t been used for over six months may not help improve your credit score. Those credit cards may be reported as inactive ones by credit card issuers, as a result, they are not factored into all FICO credit score formulas. Therefore, it is better to use your old credit cards occasionally to keep them active so that they contribute to your credit score.

3. Piggyback

If your credit history isn’t all that long or spotless, adding a credit card account with a long, positive credit history to your report will certainly boost your score. But how do you all of a sudden add an old account to your report? You may ask someone — a friend, relative or someone you trust and who trusts you — to make you an authorized user of a credit card they’ve had for a long time and handled responsibly. By doing so, the whole entire history of the credit card from day one will show up on your credit report. In addition, the original card holder can choose not to give you the access to the credit card so that he/she can be sure that you can’t use the credit card to rack up debt.