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.