Credit Rating Tips and Tricks
photo credit: orphanjones
If you’re concerned about having a healthy credit rating - and who wouldn’t be - some recent tips from Gerri Willis should interest you. She’s got four main pieces of advice to improve and retain a good credit rating:
- Don’t close your credit card accounts after you pay off your debt - this affects your FICO score because it’s calculated comparing how much debt you have to what your credit limits are.
- Don’t sign up for retail store credit cards. They will access your credit score and this damages it - and much more so if you are early on in your credit experience.
- Make more than the minimum payments on your credit cards. Willis suggests that to keep your credit score healthier, you should use a maximum of 10% of the credit available to you. As well as trying to make more than the minimum repayments, it is very important to make the payments on time - the punctuality of payments you make contributes about one third of the information to your FICO score.
- Remember that negative information on your credit rating gets less important as time goes on. Most debts are erased after seven years, so just give it time and things can improve.
Tags: credit | Credit Score | FICO
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 3:30 am and is filed under Debt Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
