While your past credit history is exactly that, past history, but it is very important to understand that this is one of the most important factors that the credit bureaus use to determine your credit score and whether a lender will see you as risk or not.

Your credit history is the best indicator that prospective creditors have on how you will be expected to repay your debts in the future. Even if you have changed your habits and are now more financially competent you will still have to deal with the fact that this information will remain on your reports for up to seven years.

All of the credit bureaus use weighting factors to determine your score. Of these factors, approximately 30 percent weighting is placed on credit history. You must understand that apart from the fact that you can't change what is in the past, you can start proving to the credit agencies that you are less of a risk now by paying all your current debts on time and in full.

This will provide the with a positive sign of what they will be able to expect in the future.

The more and the bigger the problems you have had in the past the more work you will have to do to convince all of your future creditors that you deserve a second chance.

Bankruptcies, collections, judgements and unpaid taxes are the ones that will affect your score the most along with any loans that have gone into default and any late payments.

If you can clean up any of these issues, it will have a substantial affect on your scores.

Bankruptcies will stay on your reports for up to 10 years from the date of filing, so you will be better off focusing on paying your current creditors and showing the credit bureaus that all of your current debts are getting paid as they should.

This will create a new pattern and a new and higher credit score will be the result of these actions.

Even though it can take a while to reverse your past credit history if it has been poor, there is no time like the present to get started. The sooner you start the more likely you will be able to secure smaller amounts of credit which will in turn, speed up the process of boosting your credit scores.

So the lesson here is that even though your past credit history may be crappy, there is usually always something that can be done to improve it and begin the habits of good credit.

Ron Barrett is the author of "15 Proven Credit Strategies; How to Get the Credit That You Deserve", a detailed guide on how to monitor, repair and maintain your personal credit report and credit scores. In the guide, he provides methods that he personally used to clean up his credit report and raise his credit scores from the low 500's to the upper 600's and explains how you can easily do that too.