Some things stay the same forever, until we do something to change things. Like my weight. It was the same for about ten years, until I finally went on a diet and lost 23 lbs this summer. It required changing my foods, practicing portion control and drinking more water daily for about 100 days. I've maintained my weight loss and decided to try to lose a few more pounds so I have a weight loss cushion for the upcoming holiday food binges that are certain to happen.
The other thing that pretty much has been the same forever is our credit score. It's a good score, and there's no need to improve it. Except when you are really close to perfect, its tempting to strive for it. A perfect credit score is 850. I'm not sure if its even attainable for anybody. I know there are a bunch of factors how its determined exactly. I just know it pops up on Mint every time you login, and its on other banking apps so we get reminded fairly often what it is. But there is no need for that because it hasn't changed for us. But low and behold, for the first time in as far back as I remember our credit score increased from 828 to 834 this week. Granted we haven't really done anything to try to improve our score since we didn't have plans to buy anything that would require good credit. So, it was quite the surprise when I checked our net worth on Mint and a new credit score popped up. We haven't done anything to make it change except maybe one small thing I did in the last month. We don't have any loans, mortgages or credit card debt so that didn't affect it.
The only thing I did different was pay off the credit cards on a weekly basis whenever I noticed a new balance on Mint. Usually, I let all the charges accrue and then just pay when I think they might be due. We pay all our cards off online so I never really know when they are due. I know that's not a good practice to not have due date awareness, so I don't recommend it. But, this past month I've been just paying them off pretty much immediately because we had some travel where were offline for a week. So I paid them before, and then paid them after, and then again a week later.
Now for the disclaimer, I'm not sure paying off cards weekly was what triggered the score to increase, but is the only variance in our finances. My theory is that although we still spend thousands monthly through credit cards and utilize our credit, the amount of time any balance is outstanding has greatly decreased by paying off balances immediately.
It couldn't hurt to try if you too are trying to increase your credit score.
