How to Protect Your Credit Score

I’ve said it before and will continue to remind you that your credit score is important. A healthy credit score is a necessity, and if you heard that it isn’t a necessity to have a good credit score, that’s simply not the case.

Credit scores are used for much more than simply allowing entities to know who they should and shouldn’t extend credit to when an application is submitted. It’s also used to determine insurance premiums, mortgage rates, and even whether or not you will be hired or even considered for employment at some companies.

Now with this being said, I want to provide you with ways to protect your credit score, starting with the most obvious method first.

Make those payments on time. Payments that are made on time are always determined to be a positive action when it comes to most credit scoring systems, and this includes payments that include only the minimum payment amount. Of course, if you are paying more than the minimum on some credit balances, that is even better.

There may come a time when you are asked to cosign for a loan. Cosigning is a bad idea in most cases, and it’s not something that you want to do if you’re trying to protect your credit score. Whatever you are co-signing for will remain on your file and will affect your credit score until it’s paid in full, either by the individual who had asked you to cosign or by you, if they happen to stop making payments and you become responsible. There’s a reason that a cosigner is deemed to be necessary, and regardless of your affiliation with the borrower, you should almost always kindly turn down the request to cosign.

Another way to protect your credit score is to keep your oldest accounts open. Getting out of debt is the goal, but you don’t have to destroy all of your credit cards in the process. Closing one or two accounts periodically is fine, but you should continue to keep your oldest accounts open. This will help to guard your credit score since a higher value is placed on accounts with a longer history.

Continually monitoring your accounts is incredibly important in order to protect your credit score. SmartCredit is one of the easiest ways to keep an eye on things and to see how your credit score will improve with various scenarios taking place. If you haven’t checked it out already, you can get a 7-day trial to check out this very useful tool at smartcredit.com/followme. This special link unlocks the 7-day trial so that you can decide for yourself if this is the right tool for you. God bless.