I have spoken about credit a lot. It is one (but not the only) important piece of your mortgage puzzle. What can hurt you score, cant often times be more obvious than what can be done to help. Today I’m talking about the five things that you can do to improve your score, because the little number follows you whether you like it or not!
- Bring, and keep, your open accounts current. The most important part of your FICO score is a history of on-time payments. If an account becomes 30 days past due, you can lose a lot of points. It is much more important to bring and keep open accounts current than to handle old collection items of closed accounts.
- Reduce your credit card utilization. Utilization is defined as the percentage of your available credit that you are using. To calculate your utilization, divide your statement balances by your credit limits. If you have $10,000 of available credit and have a $1,000 balance, your utilization rate is 10%. According to data from Experian Decision Analytics, people with the best credit scores (above 780) have a utilization rate of 5.6%.
Story via Forbes
