Weird Stuff That Hurts Your Credit

You may not know that there are little things that you wouldn't think could hurt your credit scores that will. Some cards such as Capital One refuses to report its customers' credit limits to the credit bureaus. This causes the bureaus to use the highest balance that was charged as the proxy for the credit limit. This in turn can cause a depression in the consumer's credit score. The lower your score, the higher interest rates you will be charged on other loans. Low credit scores can even affect your insurance premiums. If you know that you're not being reported correctly by certain companies there are only three things you can do about it. First, you could fight it and try to get the company to change it. Second, you could reset your limit to something higher but make sure that you can pay it off. Or you could switch to a card that reports correctly all the time.

Some other strange things that can influence your credit scores are doing balance-transfer and settling debts. When you switch cards all the time it can cause your credit scores to drop. One reason is because you are opening a new card. The FCIO formula would rather see several debts reported then just one consolidated debt. Settling debts in collections for less then the original debt is also a bad idea because it will also drop you credit score.

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