One of the key components of your credit score is paying your bills on time, and one way to ensure this happens is setting up autopay for any recurring bills, like student loans or car payments.
One simple way to improve your credit utilization rate is requesting an increase in credit limit; doing so will immediately decrease your ratio if you do not exceed it.
Paying Down Your Credit Card Balances
Paying down credit card balances is proven to improve credit scores; specifically, the payment history component has the most profound influence over this factor of your score.
One component that plays a part in your credit scores is your utilization rate, which measures how much debt you carry compared to available credit. Conventional wisdom dictates keeping this figure below 30 percent as being ideal.
If your credit utilization ratio is too high, consider asking your card issuer for an increase to your credit limit. This can often be accomplished online or over the phone in under one minute and can help bring down utilization rates without negatively affecting scores.
An effective way to increase your credit utilization rate is paying down balances multiple times every month, which will both speed up reduction and demonstrate your responsibility with money management.
Monitoring Your Credit Score
Credit scores are crucial three-digit numbers that measure your risk as a borrower and are used by creditors, lenders and financial services providers when making decisions about eligibility for loans and credit cards; it may even influence decisions by banks, insurance providers and employers.
An effective credit monitoring service monitors your reports and scores to alert you to changes that could signal identity theft or fraud. They typically notify when new accounts have been added to your report or when there have been changes to your personal details, spending habits or credit utilization ratio.
Credit monitoring services should provide insight into which factors are impacting changes to your score, so that you can take appropriate action. For instance, if payment history comprises 35% of your score (such as in FICO or VantageScore) then paying down balances could improve credit utilization ratio and raise it, leading to an increase in score.
Limiting Your Inquiries
Inquiries play an integral part in credit scoring, but only when applied for loans. Lenders frequently conduct hard inquiries when reviewing loan applications from potential borrowers; moreover, multiple hard inquiries within a short period could indicate to lenders that you are actively looking for credit lines and may present greater risk than other borrowers.
There are ways to decrease the number of hard inquiries. Lenders and credit card issuers tend to treat multiple hard inquiries for similar types of loans (such as a mortgage and auto loan) as one inquiry, which lessens their effect on your scores. Still, it’s wise to only submit applications when necessary and only inquire when necessary. Also when increasing credit limits ask your card issuer if this can be accomplished without incurring another hard inquiry.
Keeping Old Accounts Open
Maintaining old credit accounts, especially those with long histories and high limits, can often be beneficial. But you must balance this against potential fee accumulation. In addition to helping keep your interest charges at a manageable level, keeping these active shows that you can manage multiple accounts responsibly – something which helps ensure consistent scores across your accounts.
Closing an account could impact your credit in various ways:
Closed accounts have an effect on several areas of your credit score: 1) Average age of accounts (15% of score); 2) Credit Utilization Ratio (10% or lower is optimal); and finally closing an old card can lower its total average account age, potentially significantly decreasing your score; it may be more beneficial in the long run to pay down debt instead of closing cards.