Your credit score can be confusing. How do you know whether or not you have “good” credit or “bad” credit? It will benefit you to learn what influences your credit score, and what you can do to improve it.

Why It Matters

Your credit score is one of the most important tools creditors use to determine whether or not you are a good candidate for a loan or for a charge card. A poor score can prevent you from buying a house, a car, funding a child’s tuition or obtaining other types of credit.

What You Need to Know

Want to improve your credit score? Here are about 15 reasons why your credit score is not as high as it could be:

• Recent late pays or delinquency on accounts.
• Good credit accounts not reporting to all bureaus.
• Incorrect balances on auto & mortgage accounts.
• Authorized user accounts that have high balances or delinquency.
• Not enough credit.
• Account payment history too new to rate.
• Too many recent inquiries in the last 12 months.
• Too many accounts opened in the last 12 months.
• Balance to limit ratio on revolving accounts is too high.
• Time since delinquency is too recent or unknown.
• Amount past due on accounts.
• Account reporting in Partial Payment Plan (includes Loan Modifications)
• Account showing in dispute.
• Variations in identification, name or address information.
• Fraud alerts on file.

Steps to Take

1. Pull your credit reports.
2. Check for any of the above items.
3. Dispute inaccuracies immediately with the credit bureaus.