Buy Posters at AllPosters.com

Nothing is a more important part of your personal finances than your credit score. Lenders will use it to decide if they will give you a loan and at what interest rate. It can literally be the difference between getting a nice home and being turned down for a loan. Even with how important they are, many people do not understand how credit scores work and what factors make them fluctuate up and down.

You might be doing everything in your power to get the highest credit rating possible. But can things that other people do affect your credit? To many people’s amazement, the answer is yes!. However, there is a lot that you can do to minimize its impact on your all-important credit score.

Out of all the information credit bureaus keep, they come up with a single three-digit number to represent your credit standing. This is known as a credit score. The FICO score is most commonly reported and used because it is the average of the score created for you by the tree major credit bureaus. Going to a site like myfico service will retrieve your FICO score for you.

Credit scores change over time, as they are continuously updated with new information about your accounts and credits. The amount of money you owe in total, as well as the kind of debt you have and your payment history goes into your credit scores. Pure length of credit history will have an effect as well.

The most critical issue is your payment history, as it impacts your credit score the most. One of the ways in which other people can damage your credit is if a company wrongly reports that you are delinquent in making on-time payments. This is more common that you would believe, and it can be a real fight to fix the damage done.

People who have had this happen to them know that a single mistake in the information a company reports can cause them years of hassle. It takes lots of time and frustration to finally get the wrong information corrected so your credit score gets back to where it is supposed to be. The good news is that you have the law on your side, and most issues like this eventually come down in the customer’s favor.

Check your credit report. If your score is a lot lower than you expected, you should check if a credit bureau has incorrect information about your financial profile. You usually already know if the problem is misinformation about payments, but the incorrect information could be coming from other sources and causing your score to be low.

So to answer the question of whether others can negatively impact your credit score, the answer is mixed. They can by making a mistake, but if you are vigilant and take the time and effort to correct those mistakes you can get your credit back to its rightful place.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Your Money: Danger Lurks When Shopping for Student Loans
• Know Your Credit History
• Settling the credit score