some of you here seriously are over 20k in credit card debt? I was up near 8 or 9K in CC debt but paid it all off over the past few years. I\'m using a massive credit line we have for remodeling our new house... I think i\'ve only racked up 3 or 4k so far... but that dosen\'t count.
My wife and I have about 8 credit cards and all but 2 have $0 balances, we have so many because we used the 0% interest on transfers (the trick is you can\'t use the card, once you do a nice fat APR kicks in... we just cut the cards up as soon as we got them), this helped pay off our debts with less interest. It actually hurts your credit score to cancel paid off cards because it hurts your credit/debt ratio. It won\'t hurt that much in the long run, but we have a lot of smaller cards we are just too lazy to cancel.
And like Eik said, take out a small loan from the bank and pay it back in about 6 months or so, that will improve your score more than anything.
Also, everyone is entitled to one free credit report per year. I actually got mine today for free through this site. If you go to a site that asks for a credit card number then go somewhere else. Acutally here is where I got mine
https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jsp You have to pay $7.95 or so to get your FICO score, but that\'s typical.