Understanding Your Credit Score

Filed in archive Credit on November 26, 2008

I heard an informative story on National Public Radio earlier this week about credit scores - and about how you can keep yours in tact in hard economic times.

I found out that some of my own past behavior may have hurt my FICO score a little. What's a FICO score? Good questions. And one of the things I liked best about the NPR story was that it gave me a history of FICO (an acronym for the Fair Isaac Corporation). So I'll let you find your answer at NPR.

But we all know we have a credit score. And we all know of the things that could hurt our credit score. What I didn't know was that the length of my history with a credit source was a factor in determining my score. I've had a habit over the years of paying for graduate school by opening an interest-free (introductory offer) credit card to put my tuition on. The, when the time comes to start paying interest (nine to 15 months down the road) I'd roll the balance over to a new interest-free card and close the original account. So even though I never missed a payment, my history with a lender was pretty short... And that's bad for my score.

You can listen to the story here.


Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Marcus Clackson