 TITLE: How Often Is My Credit Score Updated? CONTENT: Factors to Focus On to Improve Your Credit Score\n------------------------------------------------\nIf you were to check your credit score every day, no matter which credit scoring system was used, it would be normal to see the score move up and down a bit. Rather than worrying about these small fluctuations, your focus should be on long-term score improvement.\nFortunately, no matter which scoring system is used, you can promote credit score improvements by cultivating good habits around a set of factors that influence all credit scores.\nThose factors are:\n1.  **Payment history**: Making timely payments is the most important contributor to any credit score, and no single event has a greater negative impact on your score than a late payment. (Bankruptcy has a longer-lasting impact on credit scores, but it's very rare for anyone to file bankruptcy before accumulating one or more late payments that have already lowered their credit scores considerably.) Payment history accounts for 35% of your FICO® Score.\n2.  **Credit utilization**: Your credit utilization ratio, the percentage of your credit card borrowing limits represented by your outstanding balances, accounts for about 30% of your FICO® Score. Using more than 30% of your available credit can have a negative impact on your credit scores.\n3.  **Average age of your credit accounts**: You can't do much to influence this factor, but over time, as long as you keep up with your bill payments, your credit scores will tend to improve. Closing credit card accounts can eventually reduce the age of accounts, so think twice before closing older accounts, even if you don't use them often. The age of your credit accounts is responsible for about 15% of your FICO® Score.\n4.  **Credit mix**: Credit scoring models consider how many credit accounts you have. A mix of loan types—including installment loans and revolving credit accounts—is seen as a sign of solid debt management, and tends to promote credit score improvement. Credit mix accounts for about 10% of your FICO® Score.\n5.  **New credit activity**: Credit checks related to new credit applications, known as hard inquiries, typically have a short-term negative impact on credit scores, as does opening new loans or credit accounts. As long as you keep up with your bills, your scores typically rebound from these dips within a few months. New credit activity is responsible for about 10% of your FICO® Score.\nContinual updates to your credit report can cause frequent credit score changes, but day-to-day and week-to-week fluctuations are less important than long-term improvements you can achieve when you develop good credit habits. END