What To Know About FICO Scoring

Your FICO score is a vital component of managing your finances. This is the number used by the credit bureaus to determine how good your credit is. The FICO scoring system can appear to be pretty complicated if you do not know how it works. On the other hand, if you know how your FICO score is calculated, you can easily find ways to keep a good score or repair a bad one. Understanding your FICO credit score is key to maintaining good credit and keeping yourself afloat.

The first part of knowing how the FICO scoring system works is to know what qualifies as a good credit score. The highest score you can receive is 850. The best range is between 720 and 850, with scores from 675 up to 719 still representing good credit. Scores below 675 may have trouble getting good terms on money borrowed, and below 620, it may be hard to get credit at all. A score of 300 is the bottom of the FICO score ladder.

Your FICO credit score is made up of a number of factors. Thirty-five percent of your credit score is based on how punctual you are with payments. Any payment over thirty days late can be reported to the credit bureaus and lower your score. Thirty percent of your score is also based on your total debt — the ratio of revolving debt, like credit card balances, to available revolving credit, such as your credit limit.

Another fifteen percent of your FICO credit score is based on the length of your credit history from the time you first borrowed money to the present. Ten percent is based on the kinds of credit you use. Some kinds are weighted more heavily. The final ten percent of your FICO score is determined by how much credit you have used recently.

There are also a couple of unique things that can affect your FICO score such as how much money you owe to a court judgment or money you owe on a tax lien. These have much larger penalties, as does any kind of bankruptcy as you could imagine. The number of accounts you have open also affects your score even though it may improve the debt/credit ratio. Each time you make an inquiry on your credit, it also affects your score. Some pulls hurt more than other though. For example, if you are checking your personal credit, this is considered a soft pull and won’t really affect your score.