Keeping track of your credit health is a critical part of responsible personal finance and can save money over time. Thankfully, it’s never been easier to get free credit report details and free credit scores online. Here are your best options.
With some strategic moves, like targeting any collections owed, lowering your credit utilization ratio, and using your utility bills as a credit-building tool, your score will start climbing.
It generally takes three to six months to build credit from nothing, and you can even have a decent score within a year. But getting an excellent credit rating will take at least a few years, and will require you to demonstrate consistently responsible credit card habits.
Your FICO score is a three-digit number between 300 and 850 that indicates how likely you are to repay your debts. It is the score most often used by lenders when deciding whether you qualify for a loan or credit card.
The basic principles of building business credit are similar to those for building personal credit: Make your business’s loan and credit card payments on time, keep your credit utilization low, and avoid collections. But your business credit score is marked on a different scale than your personal credit score, and it’s monitored by different credit bureaus as well.
Most credit cards require a very good credit score of 700 or higher. And cards with lots of perks, like travel and cash back rewards, typically ask for excellent scores of 750+. But that doesn’t mean you can’t qualify for a credit card with a lower score — you just need to apply for the right one.
Applying for a line of credit always involves a hard pull on your credit. While pre-approval or employee-based credit pulls involve soft pulls. Hard pulls affect your credit, soft pulls don’t. So make sure you know the difference.
When you check your credit score, you may be wondering why your credit score is different depending on where you check it. Here’s why.
A debt-free lifestyle is appealing, but it doesn’t build the credit history that you may need later in life (when you least expect it).
If you ever want to borrow money to buy a car, a house, or fund your start-up, then you should start building a strong credit history as soon as you can. Read on to find out why your credit history matters and how to start building it when you’re young.