How Credit Scores affect YOU

If your credit is high enough, you will qualify for a lender’s best rates and terms. Your mailbox will be stuffed with low-rate offers from credit card companies, and mortgage lenders will fight for your business. You will get great deals on auto loans if you need a new car, home loans if you want to buy or refinance your house, and small business loans if you decide to start a new business.

If you score is bad or mediocre, you will enter a no man’s land where mainstream credit is all but impossible to come by. If you find someone to lend you money, you will pay high interest rates and huge fees for the opportunity. A bad or even mediocre credit score easily can cost you tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars in your lifetime.» Learn more.

You don’t even have to have a ton of credit problems to pay the price. Sometimes all it takes is a single missed payment to knock more than 90 points off your credit score and put you in a lender's high-risk category.

That would be scary enough if we were just talking about loans. But, landlords and insurance companies also use credit scores to evaluate applicants. A good score can win you cheaper premiums and better apartments, while a bad score can make insurance more expensive and place to live hard to find.