How New Credit Card Rules May Affect Your Credit Score

You pay attention to your financial affairs and your credit score - good for you! Did you know that recent changes in the credit card laws may affect you in ways you were not expecting? Read on to learn more.

stamp of the word If you’re someone who makes the effort to maximize your credit score, you may want to take a look at the link below. It’s an article I ran across talking about how the new credit card laws might actually change the things you need to do to keep your credit score high.

For instance, one result of the new laws is that lots of credit card issuers have begun to lower people’s credit limits. Because of this, your ratio of credit being used to available credit could be lowered, which could in turn hurt your score. To combat this, you might actually want to consider opening another card to re-raise your ratio if one of your card companies lowers your limit. You certainly don’t want to go out and open multiple cards all at once, but opening one to raise that ratio could help your score.

In the days before the new law, it almost never hurt to call your creditor to ask for better terms, like lower interest rates. Now, you might want to be a bit more careful about doing that. When you ask for those lower rates, it is likely to trigger an account review. And with creditors tightening up on the credit they issue, the review could cause your creditor to lower your available balance or, worse, actually raise your rates. This doesn’t automatically mean you don’t want to ask for better terms, just that you might only want to do it in more extreme situations.

And if you’re someone who has business and personal credit card accounts, the new law might bring new factors into play. In the past, it was almost always suggested to keep business expenses on business cards and personal expenses on personal cards. Again, you don’t necessarily want to change that. But the new credit card laws don’t apply to business cards, so the rules limiting credit card companies’ abilities to hike rates and change other terms on your personal cards may cause them to throw more negative terms on your business cards. So, in certain situations, you may actually want to consider using personal cards with better terms for certain expenses.

In all of these areas, you want to be careful and consider all of your options. When in doubt, it's always best to seek legal advice. But the new credit card laws are certainly changing the rules regarding how your credit score might look. Check out the link below for more things for you to consider in terms of your own score.

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/109091/new-rules-for-credit-score?mod=bb-creditcards




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On 06/10  at  04:16 AM,

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About the Author

DBretz's photo DBretz
I have close to 10 years of experience in the financial services industry and love being able to assist people in coming up with solutions for their financial issues. I am happily married, and my wife and I love living in the community we work in. I look forward to sharing with everyone on the site.

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