What Factors Affect Your Credit Score A Web site from an arm of the credit bureau Experian now offers a free tool that can help you see how different financial steps, or missteps, can affect your credit score. There are a couple of caveats, though. The site, freecreditscore.com, does indeed offer the tool free. But it also peppers you with offers for free credit scores, which require signing up for trial subscriptions that will end up costing a monthly fee unless you cancel within a specific time. Also, the credit score provided is Experian's "Plus" score, which isn't a score that's actually used by lenders. Still, the Plus score, ranging from 330 to 830, is "indicative" of your overall credit risk, according to Experian, and can help you see general trends. All that is disclosed on the site, but it bears repeating, just so you don't unwittingly sign up for something you don't want to pay for. The "score planner" tool requires no registration. You click to answer various questions - such as whether you have a mortgage, credit cards or store cards; whether you've ever been at least 30 days late with a payment; and what your total credit limit is, across all of your cards. (It helps if you've recently pulled your free credit report - from the truly free annualcreditreport.com site - that will contain much of the information that you'll need to fill out the form accurately. The "score planner" offers to fill in the blanks for you, but be aware that doing so requires that you register you for a trial subscription.) The tool did offer some interesting insights, though I found at least one kink: a need for instructions to make clear how you actually direct the tool to recalculate your score in response to new data (a spokesman says the company is working on it). When I entered my own information, the tool initially gave me a score of 784. Not bad. Generally, scores over 700 are considered to reflect good credit risk, depending on the scale used. But I'd like it to be at least 800. I already knew about one problem, which I confirmed by checking my free credit report - a ding for a late payment a few years back, which I had tried to clear up but had, in fact, not been removed. The late payment came in early 2009 when, inexplicably, a retailer began mailing my credit card statements to my younger brother's address, in another state. After a bit of joking on the phone with him (he told me he loved me but, no, he wouldn't be paying the bill for my new jeans), I called the retailer to explain that I hadn't paid the bill on time because I hadn't received it on time. The address was corrected, but the late payment has remained on my credit report (negative information can stay on your report for seven years). I now get my bills electronically, so that sort of thing shouldn't, theoretically, happen again. What would my score be, absent the late payment? I changed number of late payments in the tool from a "one" to a "zero," and clicked outside of the box. When you do this, the box with your new data becomes highlighted in blue, and your score will change to show the impact. The tool showed that without the late payment, my score would rise by 13 points, to 797. That doesn't sound like much, but the cumulative impact of this and other tweaks can be substantial. The exercise reminded me that I should try again to have the late payment removed. The tool also shows the benefit of having credit available. Changing the amount for my total credit available to $10,000 from $30,000, for instance, lowered my score by 10 points, to 774. Applying for credit also has an effect. We refinanced our mortgage last year, so there was at least one "hard" inquiry on the account, meaning that a lender checked on my credit. Removing that inquiry, the tool showed, would increase my score by 21 points, to 805. And therein lies one of the maddening aspects of credit scoring. To have a credit score, you have to apply for credit. But actually applying for credit may lower your score, depending on your overall financial picture, so you should do so only when you really need to. Good thing we're on time with payments on our new, refinanced mortgage. Having too many late payments on a real estate loan, the tool said, would shave 40 points off my score. Give the tool a try and see what you think. Do the changes reflected in your score seem proportionate to the new information?