Lies about Credit Scores

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There’s plenty of rumors flying around constantly about what actually can and can’t hurt your credit score. Here are just a few of those lies that will (hopefully) put you more at ease when it comes to your own.
1. Checking your own score will hurt it. Contrary to popular belief, you can check your own credit score freely without worrying about hurting it. This comes from many not understanding the difference between hard and soft scores—getting a hard score more than once in a year can hurt your score while requesting many soft scores will not.
2. Closing old accounts will improve your score. This one might actually work in the opposite way. If you close old credit card accounts, you may end up showing a shorter credit history than you actually have, which will end up hurting your score.
3. Paying off financial mistakes will remove them. There’s no way to run from financial mistakes unfortunately. Missed payments and going to collections will hurt your score, and even if you pay up on the debts, you can’t get rid of what actually happened.

Image via My BankTracker.

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