Barry Ripp ~ East Bay Area Real Estate

Maintaining a good credit score can help you in a number of financial situations.  For example, most lenders use your FICO score to judge credit worthiness.  FICO stands for Fair Isaac Corp. which analyzes credit information to come up with a score.

A good score can mean a lot when it comes to your interest rate for car loans and home loans.

One key to keeping a good credit score is a combination of continuing to use your credit responsibly and paying down balances as soon as you can. I think it’s better to pay your credit cards off each month to avoid paying the high interest.  So don’t buy more than you can afford to pay off.

To make sure you don’t have any credit errors, check your own credit at least once a year. You can get a free report from each of the three credit reporting agencies.

For a free copy of your credit report from all three agencies, you can visit: www.annualcreditreport.com  They will ask several questions to insure security and also ask you to pay for an upgraded report, but a free report is available.

I hope you find this information helpful. I feel we all need to be more careful about using credit. But credit can be a useful tool when we need it.

 ~ Barry

Rates on 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages averaged 4.85 percent for the week ending March 26, following an announcement by the Federal Reserve that it is launching a new effort to assist the U.S. housing market. The rate marked a record low in the history of the Freddie Mac survey. The previous low was 4.96 percent set during the week of Jan. 15.

To read the full story, http://takeaction.realtoractioncenter.co…