 TITLE: How to Improve Your Payment History CONTENT: Benefits of Paying Your Bills on Time\n-------------------------------------\nGetting in the habit of paying your bills on time can pay off in lots of ways:\n*   **Help improve your credit scores**. Making all your debt payments on time can go a long way toward helping you build good credit. Lenders view steadily rising credit scores as evidence that you pose less of a risk as a borrower, so as scores increase over time, you gain access to a wider array of loans and credit cards, with potentially higher loan amounts and credit limits and lower interest rates and fees.\n*   **Avoid penalties from your lender.** Loan contracts and cardholder agreements typically spell out fees or penalties you must pay if you miss a payment due date by as little as one day. On a first offense you might be able to get a lender to rescind the penalty (it can't hurt to ask), but those fees can really add up. And credit card penalties are added to your purchase balance, so they can cost you interest charges as well. It's far less costly to just make your payments on time.\n*   **Worry less.** If you don't have a system for ensuring payments are made on time, you can spend a surprising amount of energy fretting about whether you've made this or that payment already this month, scrambling to transfer funds in the eleventh hour, and otherwise sweating over the state of your bills. We all experience anxiety over things we can't control, and taking charge of a manageable task like bill paying can make your life a little calmer and less stressful.\nA healthy credit history can bring some peace of mind and will promote steady credit score improvement. Checking your credit score and report for free through Experian can help you see how improving your payment history can have a positive effect. As long as you pay your bills on time every month without fail, and attend to the other factors that contribute to credit scores, monitoring your credit scores will be a satisfying endeavor. END