Credit Scores and My Goal to Improve It

I just checked my credit score, and I'm just barely in that "excellent" range. But I've found some things that are pretty interesting online about how to improve your score.

I think the easiest way for me to improve my score is to decrease my debt to credit ratio. Right now I'm at 73%. I'd like to get that to 50% over the next year or so. There is two ways to do this. The easiest way is to increase the amount of credit that is available to me. The other day I actually closed the account for Meg's ring that I had paid off, now that I know more about this ratio, I probably should not have closed that account.

The more difficult, but better in the long run, is to actually pay down the debts that you owe. But for me to hit my 50% ratio, I'd have to decrease my debts by about $60,000. This probably isn't reasonable to expect to happen over the next year. So ultimately it'll probably need to be a combination of paying down debt and increasing the credit available to me.

I took one step towards this a week ago when I called my credit card company and asked to have my credit limit raised. They raised it by about $2,000. So it wasn't much, but it helped! And to me, it doesn't really matter because I pay off the balance every month.

But there is a risk of your debt to credit ratio being too low! They say a good range to stay within is 40%-60%. If your ratio is too low, then you have too much credit available to you.

If you have any questions let me know and I'll see what I can dig up.

March 10, 2009

So I finally hopped on the Twitter bandwagon and started my own feed. It's really interesting, you can even text in your updates. It's a way to put yourself out there again. And I've really begun to realize that blogging, twittering, and facebooking are the ways that people network these days. No longer do you have to go hang out at the local bars and wait to see what business people might show up. Now you go home and let the world know what you're doing and how good you are at it!

Now to my goals:

The other day Megan and I were at a decorating store that was going out of business, and we made an impulse buy on a bed frame. But we got it for 60% off and it was on our list of things we wanted to get this year. So I think it was a good buy. I won't be able to pay off my car this month, but that's fine. As long as I can pay my bills and I don't carry a credit card debt, I'm good to go! But we need to set a budget and try to stick to it. But thanks to my company sending me different places to work we can decrease our costs!

My working out hasn't been the best, but I've tried to cut back on my eating, so it's balanced out. I've also tried to get more sleep, so that helps me feel better too.

My focus has been decent, but I need to get back in the office so I can get back in the zone.

I'm going to try to get through a couple of magazines tonight and maybe get a start on the book that I brought, but we'll see.

I'm hoping to get the ceiling fan that we bought put up this weekend, but we'll see, there's a lot going on.

March 4

So much to do with no time! With all the layoffs and everything going on, how are people supposed to get their stuff done in the same amount of time? There's only one way to do it, and that's to sacrifice quality. To me, that's not a very good trade off. And like so many people have mentioned before, with all of the technology we have now, we should be able to get a lot more done in less time. But that's not how it works...

The ring is paid off! FINALLY! Next is the car!

My working out has sucked, I feel like crap, and I'm flabby! I need to get back into it. The good thing is that it's getting warmer out, so I'm ready to run outside instead of on the thumping treadmill.

My focus has been off because there's so much to do. I need to focus on certain tasks at certain times of the day instead of trying to do everything at once and getting distracted by people. Tomorrow there's some big actions that need to get done that I'm going to try to focus on.

Lately I've been reading lot of blogs and my magazines. I've fallen pretty far behind on those. I'm going to start reading through the books that are in my bookcase. I'm not sure what's up first.....

The house is great, Megan does an amazing job when I'm gone traveling!