Resource Category: Credit

It takes more than on-time payments to build a good credit score. Understanding the five main credit scoring factors can help you boost your credit scores. These five factors help explain how information in your credit reports will be evaluated when your personal credit scores are calculated. The better you score on each of these factors, the higher your credit scores. Using the FICO model, here are the five main factors that affect your credit score: Payment History (35%) Debt… Read More

Whether you pay bills on time is the single most important factor that makes up your personal credit scores. It is also a major factor when it comes to your business credit, but there are some differences in the way it is evaluated. Here’s what you need to know. If you miss a payment on your personal credit card, car loan or mortgage by a few days, chances are it won’t hurt your credit scores. With personal credit reports, payment… Read More

After payment history, debt is the second most important factor in your credit reports. When most people think of debt in relation to their credit scores, they probably think in terms of how much they owe. But credit scoring models often look at it somewhat differently. While the amount you owe is important, even more important is how you are managing your revolving accounts such as credit cards. Here, most credit scores will calculate something called a “debt usage” or… Read More

Whenever someone accesses your personal credit reports or scores, the credit reporting agency that fulfilled that request must, by law, record that “inquiry” on your credit report. Because certain inquiries have been found to be associated with greater credit risk, they may affect your credit scores. In other words, recent inquiries on your credit reports can cause your credit scores to drop. Learn more about how inquiries can impact your credit scores in this article from Nav's experts. What to… Read More

Just like being able to demonstrate a variety of previous responsibilities at work can help you land a better job, consumers with the best credit scores tend to have a wider range of experience with credit. In other words, they don’t just have a single credit card or a car loan. Instead, their credit reports list a mix of different types of credit accounts (ideally paid on time, of course). Specifically, many credit scoring models are looking for a mix… Read More

When it comes to building strong credit scores, experience helps. Credit scores are designed to evaluate information from your credit history to predict how likely you are to pay on time in the future. To do that, they require information about how you’ve handled your accounts in the past. If you don’t have much in the way of credit references on your credit reports, you’ll have what’s called a “thin file” and it will be harder to earn a high… Read More