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How to Maintain a Good Credit Score: Now + Forever

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How to Maintain a Good Credit Score: Now + Forever

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In theory, keeping your credit score up isn't exactly difficult. In practice, I imagine, it's a little more difficult, but by following a couple of rules, it shouldn't be too bad:

1) Pay your bills! Don't let them pile up, and be super up-to-date about making them.
2) Maintain your credit over a longer period of time - it'll look good.
3) Don't go haywire and apply for more credit than you need or overuse the credit that you have.
4) Essentially, be careful (13).

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For this, we'll consider student loans and what I hope my income will be based off of national averages. So, that would imply that my monthly income would be about $2,797 as a starting salary. Using the monthly student loan payments from the 4.2 Learning Assessment, I can determine that to be about $314. Excluding payments for things such as mortgage payments and credit card payments, my DTI ratio would be 11.2%. Without those other payments, this is not entirely accurate, but it is an estimate nonetheless.

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DTI = (Monthly Debt Payments) / (Monthly Gross Income) x 100

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DTI = (Monthly Debt Payments) / (Monthly Gross Income) x 100

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(12)

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Debt to Income Ratio (DTI Ratio) is precisely what it sounds like; a ratio that compares the amount of debt payments an individual has to their monthly income (11).