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Monitoring and building good credit can be challenging!

If the credit bureaus, and there are three of them, namely Equifax, Transunion and Experian, give you a low credit score you can bet that credit card companies love the opportunity to charge you extra fees and a higher interest rate. They base their charges on your score. A high score gives you cheaper access to credit and of course the opposite is true.

So here are some rules of thumb that will help:

• If you have to have a credit card try to use it as a charge card, which means pay it in full each month.
• If you cannot pay in full each month then do not spend more than a maximum of 30% of your credit limit. So if you have a $1500 credit limit on a card, only spend up to $500 max.
• Try to have no more than three credit cards.
• Always pay on time and never go over thirty days. If you do not pay on time you will get a late fee which will have the effect of not reducing your balance.
• When you can, try to avoid credit cards altogether.