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Originally Posted by JustJo

Just an FYI...if you want to improve your credit score there's a few key things...

1. pay your bills on time...all of them and always
2. have 3 open lines of credit...that's mortgages, car loans or credit cards
3. do not exceed 1/3 of your available credit...so if the credit card company says your limit is $1000 never have more than a $300 balance on that card

Obviously, you can't do the third one with a car payment or a mortgage in the beginning of the loan....but asking the credit card company to cut your limit in half will make it look like you've used a larger percentage of your available credit...and lower your score.

I messed it up a long time ago - deliquent accounts, ouch. All my bills now are auto-deducted: auto insurance, credit card, Netflix, World of Warcraft - for that reason. Sometimes I'll pay it ahead just for peace of mind prior to the due date/auto deduction. USAA offers CreditCheck monitoring for $5.50/month and I have that too, and it's gone up a whopping 5 points since I started it (about 6 months ago). I saw on a site a few days ago about how having a balance higher than 30% of your overall limit is actually a bad thing - I wasn't aware of this - which led me to suck it up and pay off my balance of $480 out of $500 *nods*