Your credit report impacts your ability to obtain a loan and influences the terms of your debt.
Many people don’t understand how to best manage their credit reports. You know that you need a good credit score, but you’re confused about the best ways to improve your credit and maintain stellar credit.
Financial monitoring services, like SmartCredit, are effective options for monitoring and improving the factors that affect your credit.
Key Factors That SmartcreditCan Track
The factors that influence your credit score include:
Your Payment History
Your payment history significantly influences your credit. A long history of on-time payments raises your credit score.
It only takes one or two missed payments to hurt your credit. The longer the payment is past due, the greater the impact to your credit.
For example, a payment that’s 90 days late harms your credit more than one that’s 30 days late.
Your Credit Utilization
Credit utilization can quickly boost or hurt your credit.
Your credit report displays the limits for your credit cards and revolving credit lines. It also shows how much of your credit you’re using.
If you have $30,000 of available credit and your balances equal $15,000, this means your overall credit utilization is 50 percent.
Assume that you own $9,000 on a card with a $10,000 credit line. Your credit utilization rate for this specific card is 90 percent.
Both your overall and individual credit utilizationimpact your credit.
Strive to keep your overall and individual credit utilization less than 30 percent. A lower utilization percentage will boost your credit even more.
The Age of Your Debt
A longer credit history improves your credit score.Cards and debt products that you’ve held for a long time will help your credit more than new credit accounts.
Your Mix of Credit Products
Ideally, your credit report should consistently contain a mix of debt products, including credit cards and installment loans.
Recent Credit Inquiries
When you apply for a loan or increase to your credit limit, your lender checks your credit. This is known as a hard credit inquiry.
The more recent hard inquiries you have, the more it will hurt your credit.
When you check your credit yourself, such as when you use a financial monitoring service, this results in a soft credit inquiry. Soft inquiries don’t impact your credit.
How Smartcredit Can Improve Your Credit
Smartcredit makes it easy for you to track the factors that impact your credit in a single location.
Seeing all the factors that affect your credit broken down in one spot allow you to quickly see which factors you should work on.
The ScoreTracker feature lets you check your credit score each month.
You can see how implementing certain habits, like making your payments on time and lowering your credit utilization, are impacting your credit.
Need more detailed guidance for improving your credit? The ScoreBuilder tool creates a 120-day plan to help you boost your credit score as rapidly as possible.
ScoreMaster lets you see how future behaviors, like paying down your debt, adding new debt, or opening new credit accounts will impact your credit.
Our Smartcredit report is interactive. If your report contains incorrect information, our action buttons make it easy to contact your creditors so you have a speedy resolution.
