How to Maintain a High Credit Score
The internet is chock full of information on how to improve your rating, and that’s all good and great, but once you’ve gotten yourself up there, how do you maintain a high credit score? There is a lot to know about what makes up a rating, how the range works, what to do to get to a good place, and what a good rating even is.
First let’s take a look at the credit score scale and see what a high rating would be. Truly, anything over six hundred and eighty is going to be considered great for most things, but a truly high rating is going to be over seven hundred, with seven hundred and thirty being pretty much pristine.
Once you’ve reached such great heights, it is inevitable that at certain points in your life you will dip below these magical lines, but keeping that dip to being a momentary situation, and making sure it doesn’t go too far down, does take some financial know how. The first thing to understand is that your rating is made up of weighted information from across your report. Things like the age of your history, the amount of credit available to you versus how much you’re using, late and missed payments, and the variety of payments you are making are all things that are going to effect maintaining your high credit score. But it’s one thing to look at the facts on a report that make up your rating, it’s another to look at what it is you’re actually doing to get there.
In terms of the age of your history, if you have any cards that are older than others, it’s good to keep those accounts open and active. This doesn’t mean that you have to rack up charges, in fact quite the opposite is what you want to do to maintain a high credit score. You want to use your cards very lightly. It is recommended that you only use under thirty percent of the limit and you pay that off at the end of every month. This keeps things active, but keeps you from racking up debt.
This is also good for another factor that helps you keep your rating looking good—the amount of credit available to you put against the amount you are using. The less you are using, and the more available to you, the better off you look. This shows that you are in control of your finances and aren’t just borrowing every chance you get, and is a small thing that gives a good boost to your number.
Making any kind of late payments is really going to drag you down and is probably the worst thing you can do to your high rating, except having missed payments altogether—this would definitely be worse. Making sure that you have a budget laid out and are keeping on top of any and all payments is the number one thing you need to do to maintain a high credit score, and is in fact so important, that in most articles this is the only thing people will you to do because it’s so important to just focus on not missing payments. This sets you back on your rating, and takes a lot of time to rebuild from. Remember, above all else, never miss a payment.
If you have a good amount of loan history, or card history, but not a lot of the other then something you can do to give yourself a bit of a boost is build some more payment history in the area you are lacking. Your score is made up of a history with both of these types of payments, and the people with the best scores are going to have both. Don’t do this at a time when you want to use your high credit score to do something soon though as your rating will take a dip right when you sign up for something new. This dip is temporary, and the payments over time will make you look even better than before, but is definitely something to be aware of when you are trying to keep yourself looking good financially.
This may seem like a lot to take in, but if you break it down they’re really just small things to keep in mind when handling your finances so that you can maintain a high credit score and are much better than ever having to worry about improving it down the road. Be careful with your finances, stick to a budget, always make your payments on time, and you should be able to avoid any major dips on your rating.