Understanding Your Credit Score

The first thing you need to know about your credit score is that you don’t have one credit score: you have many, and they change all the time.

Credit scores are designed to be a snapshot of your credit picture- typically, the picture that’s contained in your credit report. New information is constantly being added to your report, and old information is being deleted. Those changes affect your score.

Because of this, maintaining your credit can sometimes seem be hard work. If you have a bad score now, you’re not stuck with it forever. You can do a lot to improve your situation and make yourself more credit-worthy in lender’s eyes. When you have a good score, you need to constantly monitor your credit to make sure it stays that way. There are five parts to the FICO Credit Scoring System: