 TITLE: Does the Type of Credit Score Matter? CONTENT: How to Improve Your Credit Scores\n---------------------------------\nWhile there are numerous credit risk scores that fall under the FICO® and VantageScore brands, they all consider the same information: your credit report data. Simply put, if you have great credit reports, you're going to have great credit scores, regardless of the score brand, variation or generation. And while the FICO® and VantageScore credit scores max out at 850, scores in the mid-to-high 700s are generally considered to be excellent.\nCredit scoring models use roughly five categories of information to calculate credit scores. Both the FICO® and VantageScore scoring systems use the following metrics:\n*   **Payment history**: How reliably you make on-time payments is very influential to your credit scores, accounting for 35% to 40% of your score. Negative information that could appear here includes late payments, bankruptcy, collections, foreclosures, repossessions and any record of account defaults. If you can avoid these negative events, you'll be well on your way to earning and maintaining great credit scores.\n*   **Credit utilization and other debt-related metrics**: A common misconception about credit scores is that as long as you make your payments on time, you'll have great scores. Your debt load is also a very influential component of your credit scores. In fact, this category accounts for about one-third of your credit scores.  \n    This category considers the number of accounts with balances, your credit card balances relative to their limits (known as your credit utilization ratio), the percentage of your loan balances relative to loan amounts, and the amounts you owe across different types of accounts. In both the VantageScore 4.0 and FICO® 10T credit scores, your trended balance data is also considered.\n*   **Inquiries, credit age and account types**: These three categories account for the remaining roughly one-third of your credit score calculation. Individually these categories are the least influential, but if you want top credit scores, then they are important.\nThese categories consider the number of inquiries on your credit reports in the past 12 months, the age of your oldest account (the more credit history you have, the better), the average age of your accounts, and the mix of account types on your credit reports. END