5 steps for improving your credit rating

    1. Close out your newest accounts so that you don’t lose your longer credit history.
    2. Close out accounts slowly over several months.
    3. Verify that all accounts you’ve closed are reported as “closed by consumer” for the best report.
    4. Even if creditors offer to raise credit limits, allow yourself only moderate credit limits.
    5. Keep your balances low and avoid revolving balances

(please note that the 5 steps above were taken from bankrate.com…..my quote maker was not working well when I wrote this post and I do not want to be accused of plaigarism.)

These are just some simple tips to help improve your credit score by working on your credit cards. I have always read that you should not close your cards because that hurts your credit but what they say here seems to make some sense.

If the credit bureaus check your oldest cards as having more weight than your newer ones then your credit score should not be hurt when you close those cards out. Closing the accounts over a long period of time also makes sense because you do not want a huge flurry of activity on your credit cards all at once since this will send up a red flag.

According to this article having your credit limit increased is looked at as a sign of someone who is anticipating money problems. At first I thought you should take the largest credit line increase that you could possibly get since a leading piece of advice is to keep your outstanding credit to available balance ratio as low as possible.

So if you carry a balance of $2380 on a $3000 card and you can get your line increase to $5000 then your ratio falls from 79% to 48%……yippeee!!! But now the current thinking is that you were doing fine with $3000 so why should you need $5000 in a hurry? It must be because you anticipate needing more credit soon, which translates to you wanting something but not having the money to pay for it.

This is bad. This is very bad. It will hurt your credit score because other creditors will look at you as someone who may not be able to pay off what what you already owe. More interest for them…..but this increases the risk that you get so far behind that they never collect their money.