Your FICO credit score is made up of several factors including your payment history, amounts owed, types of credit used, your account history and new credit.
In this article discover which factors are more likely to cause your credit score to drop and make you pay higher interest rates for your credit cards, auto and home loans, and even your auto and home insurance.
The quickest way to lower your credit score and the biggest factor that affects your score is your payment history.
Your payment history makes up more than one third of your total FICO score.
If you want to drop your scores, miss a payment or two.
Missing payments is a very big mistake and can cost you money every month for years.
If you want to have good credit scores, pay all your bills on time as agreed.
The next biggest factor that affects your FICO scores is how much debt you currently have.
You can rack up a lot of credit card debt buying the new iPhone 4 and each new version that comes out or the biggest 3-D television set you can buy and pretty soon you will have a lot of cool toys, maxed out charge cards, and very low FICO scores.
Maxing out your credit cards and making only the minimum payments makes you card companies happy and rich and you stuck in debt that is hard to get out of.
How much you currently owe on your credit cards and your payment history make up almost 2/3rds of your FICO scores.
Messing up these two factors causes your credit score to drop.
On the flip side, paying all your bills on time and only using a small percentage on each credit card is the way to increase your FICO scores.