What Is Considered A Good Credit Score?
What is considered a good credit score? Along with your credit report, you can also request your credit score (also called FICO). There will be a charge to get your credit scores from each credit reporting agency but along with your credit report, this will be the tell tale sign as to your buying power. If you are given the choice of buying an all in one report which includes your credit report from all 3 agencies along with your credit scores, don’t choose that option. This type of report is usually more of a summarized report and won’t include all the information that you need to see on your credit report.
The way I see a credit score is that it is a number which not only predicts your potential buying power but also your risk. Some see it as your ability to make credit payments on time. This credit score is your number at a particular point in time and it can change at any moment.
What is considered a good credit score? So why does your credit score matter? Are you looking to purchase a car in the near future? Maybe just getting auto insurance to go along with that new car you are thinking about. Perhaps moving into an apartment or house shopping? What about that credit card application that just showed up in the mail at 1.9% for the first six months? Hey, that department store said that I could get 10% off my purchase today if I apply for their store credit card. I’m looking for a job and I wonder what my future employer thinks of me?
All of the above could be dependant on your credit score or what some call FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation). FICO scores range from 300-850, the higher the score the better or what is also considered to be a lower risk. FICO comes up with their score through a mathematical equation. Either the credit report itself and/or the FICO score is passed on to the lender when a request for credit is made on your behalf.
How do you rank?
| FICO Credit Score | Percent of People With That Score |
| 300 – 499 | 2% |
| 500 – 549 | 5% |
| 550 – 599 | 8% |
| 600 – 649 | 12% |
| 650 – 699 | 15% |
| 700 – 749 | 18% |
| 750 – 799 | 27% |
| 800 – 850 | 13% |
If you are considering a mortgage, although FHA says that you only need a 620+ credit score, 650 or above is considered adequate. Mortgage brokers and banks really like to see that FICO at 720 and above.
Generally, a FICO score below 700 entails some sort of risk. Your goal should be to get your score at 720 or above and keep it at that level.
Good points…I would note that as someone who really doesn’t comment to blogs much (in fact, this may be my first post), I don’t think the term “lurker” is very becoming to a non-posting reader. It’s not your fault really , but perhaps the blogosphere could come up with a better, non-creepy name for the 90% of us that enjoy reading the posts.
Thank you for straightening out that for me. Although I personally think that credit scores have been going down.
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How Do I Cancel My Credit Card Here are two important questions for credit card consumers: How many credit cards do you have Do you need all of them Many consumers carry several credit cards with them on a daily basis, but use only a few over any given period of time. For many ….
Actually, you do not want to cancel your credit card. Canceling a credit card effectively reduces the amount of money that you can borrow. So what you say. Well, lets say you currently have access to $20,000 worth of credit via credit cards and you are using $8000 in credit (big screen tv’s, groceries, vacations, etc…). You are tired of phone calls from one of your credit card companies so you think that it is best to cancel the card. You don’t have a balance on the card and you have $5000 of available credit on the card.
Lets go back to the prior scenario. If you have $20K in available credit and have a balance of $8K, you are using 40% of your available credit. Now, if you cancel that $5K card, you will still have an $8K balance but will only have $15K in available credit. You will now be using 53% of your available credit. The credit bureaus see that you are using more of your available credit and will reduce your credit score. A good rule of thumb is that you do not want to be using more than 33% of your credit on any one particular card and no more than 25% of your overall available credit. In fact, if you want a good credit score, go ahead and keep a balance on each of those cards (I know… this sounds dangerous to some) but do not allow any of your individual cards to go over 20% of the available balance.
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Mind if I use some of the information from this post if I provide a link back to your site?
I apologize for the possible off-topic. Guys, could you inform me which web hosting company you are using right now I have a problem because my current web hosting company hostrator.com is kicking me off. They say that our website is using too many server resources. But our website only gets 300 visitors per day.. Anyway, what would be your recommendations? Are you happy with your web hosting providers? I am checking LCN at the moment, but is it real that they can provide unlimited disk space? I have contacted them and they say something like “1000GB disk drive costs only $30 per month, so if some day we will start running out of disk space we will simply add a new 2000GB drive so can continue uploading..”. What do you think about it? Any ideas and web hosting company name suggestions are much appreciated.
I use Hostgator for the majority of my sites but I also use bluehost. I’d recommend checking them out.
I’ve never had an issue with either company. I also run a photography site on Doteasy and they were
tops in the industry years ago. I’m not sure if that is still the case.
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