Web Wealth: Your credit score

Your credit score helps determine how much you can borrow and the interest rates you'll pay. These sites explain some strategies for maintaining or increasing your credit score.

This video and article at MoneyTalksNews includes a laundry list of ways to clean up and improve your credit score. You get a better score by asking for and getting higher credit-card limits - and then paying down the balances. And if you've got generally good credit, but miss a couple of payments, it is possible to ask the credit company for a "good-will adjustment" - where the company actually removes a late payment from your credit report. You won't be offered this option; so you have to request it, this post says.

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Jim Wang's post on boosting a credit score, found at U.S. News and World Report, notes that low credit-card balances help your score. And, if you have more than one credit card from the same bank or issuer, you may increase your score by consolidating those cards. That's because the average age of your lines of credit is part of the score, Wang says.

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The Money Girl website includes this post by Laura Adams, with tips for raising a score. Among other things, she says never to max out credit cards. One irony of credit is that even if you have a lot of it, your score drops as you increase "utilization" - meaning when you actually whip out the cards and borrow. That's also a reason not to close unused credit-card accounts, Adams says.

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Study your credit reports. Errors can lower your credit score and cost you in higher interest rates or even get you turned down for loans. Get your credit reports, for free, from the reporting companies Equifax, TransUnion and Experian. You can do it once a year from this website. This isn't a way to get your credit score. The companies usually charge for that. But knowing what is and isn't in the reports is vital to your credit health.

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