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  • 5 Practices to Avoid to Protect Your Credit Scores

    In today’s economic environment, more than ever are banks and credit card companies requiring stronger credit scores to qualify for mortgages, credit cards, auto loans and most forms of financing. However, some less obvious factors can still make a negative impact on your credit rating. They may seem counter-intuitive, and some may go against what you’ve been told in the past, but here are 5 practices to avoid which can cause your credit scores to drop down significantly.

    1. Settling past-due debts with a creditor to pay less than you owe.

    Anyone who has amassed enough credit card debt has gotten the pitches in the mail, and sleepless fretting debtors see the ads on late-night TV: Pay Down Your Debt! It always sounds too good to be true and it is.

    “Even though you’re getting rid of bad debt, it stays on your report as ‘settled’ rather than ‘paid off,’ and is now updated on the payment date, making it look like it happened more recently than the original loan. Your credit score is weighted more heavily toward recent events than past events, so taking a bad debt from the past and moving it to the present will count against you.”


    Ahh, the old trick of debt-juggling from card to card. You get an offer for a new card with an enticing 0% annual percentage rate for a whole year. Who knows what might happen in that interest-free year—you could even pay off this debt for good, right?

    Balance transfers can seem like a good idea at the time, “While it’s better for your bottom line, opening new accounts works against your credit score. Plus moving all your debts to one card could negatively impact your credit utilization (your ratio of debt to available credit).”

    3. Closing old credit cards.

    One school of thought holds that the more credit you have open, the more risk that it could be misused, or it could leave you more vulnerable to fraud, so you should close your unused cards. But closing cards hurts you two ways, by increasing your debt utilization and shortening your credit history length. “Creditors like to see that you have a lot of unused, available credit, and that you have accounts that have been open for a long time without problems.”

    4. Paying off your car or your mortgage.

    What? Paying off your mortgage can work against you? “FICO reports that 10 percent of your credit score is determined by your ‘credit mix,’ and they like to see a variety of installment and revolving loans. If all you have is an auto loan and three credit cards, paying off the car will leave you with nothing but revolving credit.” However, in that case you might want to focus on paying off that debt.

    5. Avoiding debt altogether won’t help you.

    So basically, no matter what, you’re doomed! (Kidding. See the conclusion below for a glimmer of hope.) “While eschewing debt is in vogue these days, your credit score is based on how well you can handle credit, and all of your score’s components are based on you having open debt accounts,” That means that even if you are anti-credit cards, well-managed credit accounts will eventually help your case if you plan on getting a mortgage.

    It may now seem like credit scores are a hopeless “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation. But there are ideals you can strive for to achieve a good credit rating. Therefore, it’s pretty difficult to get penalized for having too many accounts. Here are some good parameters to work with to ensure your credit scores will always be as high as possible.

    1. The ideal number of loans or credit lines is 6-21
    2. The ideal number of credit inquiries is 0-4 in the last 6 months.
    3. A 5+ year credit history is ideal.
    4. 5% to 85% credit line utilization is ideal.

    I hope you found this information useful. If you are looking for some fast and easy ways to help improve your current credit scores, click HERE for 5 tips that you can use right away to give your credit scores a boost. As always feel free to contact me with any questions you have.


    This entry was posted on Saturday, December 11th, 2010 at 11:31 pm and is filed under 5 Practices to Avoid to Protect Your Credit Scores. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.