How to maintain a good credit history

1. Start with one credit card while you are still a student and start using it for monthly transactions slowly paying its minimum payement without any due, on time.

2. Better rent a apartment than to stay in your college dorm and have commodities like electricity, water and gas taken in your name on your SSN. Pay them on time.

How not to get your credit history Duped

Being a kid from India & when I first started my journey in US I hardly had a clue on how to build my credit history. Though many gave me confusing suggestions, below are few from my experience. No matter how carefull you are, you can still end up in bad credits.

1. Have online accounts that keep track of your monthly payement dues for all your commodity bills like electricity, gas and water that run with your ssn and have zero tolerance for late pays.

2. If you end up in late payements or if you forgot paying any of these bills, there is a possible of termination in your poicies / accounts / connection and any outstanding payement will be sent to a collectin agent and further delay in payement will end as negative collection in your credit history, which will collapse your credit a bigtime. These negative remarks will shown in your history 7 years ! Guess when can this happen ? When you regurarly move between jobs and dont have online account to keep track of any dues and miss the old bills. Sometimes change in address on USPS wont be of any good as it will only do the trasnfer for 1 month. It is always safe to do the address updates on your online accounts for banks, credit card, car and life insurance. Setting a auto paymenet can be a brilliant idea but it can still dupe your credit as sometimes credit cards cancel the auto payements suspecting them to be of suspicious accounts.

3. As you move out of college purchasing a new car is first thing you might prefer to do. Be careful not to apply for car loans in too many places.. as they will show up in your credit history as bad hits and will bring down your credit history few points down. This few points drop might not hurt you, but if you say suppose the credit score risk is between very low and low, your %APR might go little too high. This is exactly what happened with my first car purchase. A score above 720 is a outstanding on scale of 830 for you to get 0.9% APR for your new car. I had a score of 743 but it still didnt help me get a low % APR since I applied too many palces with my ssn resulting in hard hits on my credit report in short span of time. A better idea can be taking a free credit report to tha banks and just ask them out of curiosity that how much % APR loan they can quote ? DO NOT give your SSN to check, just show them the score hiding your ssn. Tell them you only will give the ssn once you think that bank is offering you the lowest APR.

4. Coming to applying insurance for your car is a muddy task. There is no way you can walk to a insurance company agent like you did for the banks for your auto loan. The only good idea is to call up your local friends and talk about their insurance plans. Some might have a credit score much similar to you, no tickets or few tickets like you and same driving period.

5. While getting free credit reports do not give them your debit card details or credit card details. SSN number should do good to get the report. Always check the history of free credit reports site. You can call the trans union, experion, equifax for first 30 days free trial. Make sure they wont charge you in second month. You might just forget about it after 30 days.

6. Never ever have more than 3 credit cards. Its quite risky if you end up in late payements or your debit card or account get freezed thus not processing auto payements. DO NOT apply for store cards unless they are the stores you do 90% of the shopping. We usually forget paying bills if you checkout using store cards, as you have to pay the amount online and they are not like regular credit cards where you check the late payements regularly. Not all agents notify you of your late payements online or email. You need to keep track of snail mails they send you. Make sure again you have updated address for your store cards like khols, Costco etc (just for example.. I am not sure of the policies of khols and costco.. check their website)

7. Dont completely pay off your payement dues on credit card. Pay next minimum amounts due, so that you are paying some interest to increase your taken credit history. Remember more the interest money you keep and pay more the credit points you gain. That doesnt mean you always pay low, just make sure you are not overburduning youreslf. Since not all credit cards offer 0% APR for too long their interest can soar too high once you reach that grace period.

8. Your parents are always the best fincancial councellers. Show them your credit reports very regulalry. Keeping close eye on your credit interests of your bank loans and credit cards will help you not overburden your self thus making life easy towards developing enough credit history to purchase your life time dream home :) All the best. Dont be unlucky like me

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