The Monkey Miles cheat sheet for building and keeping a great score
Five things. They do not count equally — two of them are two-thirds of the whole thing. These are FICO's published weights, and they describe the average borrower rather than any one person: on a thin file, or one with a late payment on it, the mix shifts.
Did you pay your bills on time? That is the whole question, and it is the single biggest slice of your score.
One 30-day late payment can cost a high score 100 points or more, and it sits on your report for seven years. That is a far bigger hit than any card application will ever be. Autopay the minimum on every card as a safety net, then pay the full balance manually. The minimum autopay is not there to be your payment plan — it is there so a forgotten due date never becomes a late mark.
How much of your available credit are you using? Issuers watch this because rising balances mean rising odds you cannot pay them back — even if you have never missed a payment.
Two numbers matter: your overall utilization across every card, and the utilization on each individual card. My score plunged when one single bank's line got maxed out, even though my overall percentage still looked fine. Use the calculator below to check both.
Utilization has no memory. Pay the balance down, wait for the new statement to report, and the damage is gone. It is the fastest lever you have.
Add up the ages of all your accounts and divide by how many you have. That is your average age of accounts, and older is better.
This is the single best reason to keep a couple of no-annual-fee cards open forever. They cost you nothing and they quietly hold your average up. Closing an old card does not erase it immediately — a closed account in good standing stays on your report for up to ten years and keeps counting toward your average age the whole time. The day it falls off, your average drops. An account closed while you were delinquent is a different story: that one goes in seven years, and it is not helping you while it is there.
A hard inquiry is a lender pulling your report when you apply. FICO says one new inquiry usually costs fewer than five points — my own experience has been about 3 to 5, back to normal within three months. Inquiries sit on your report for two years, but FICO only counts them for the first 12 months. After that they are just a record a lender can see, not points coming off your score.
Rate shopping is treated differently. Multiple mortgage, auto or student loan pulls inside a 14 to 45 day window count as a single inquiry, so shop hard and shop fast. Credit card applications do not get that grace — each one counts on its own.
This is the factor people fear most and it deserves the least fear. Checking your own score is a soft pull and does nothing at all. Where it does bite is volume: six or more pulls in a year starts to look like trouble to an underwriter, and thin files get hit harder than thick ones.
Car loan, mortgage, student loan, credit cards, a lease. The more different kinds of credit you have handled responsibly, the better you look — lenders want proof you are a reliable borrower across the board.
Worth knowing, not worth chasing. Nobody should take out a loan they do not need for ten percent of a score.
Enter the balance and limit for each card. You will get your overall number and a flag on any single card that is running hot.
| Card | Balance | Credit limit |
|---|
The number behind that 15% slice. Enter roughly when each account was opened — closed accounts count too, until they fall off.
| Account | Month opened | Year |
|---|
Tick off what you already do. Whatever is left unchecked is your to-do list.
Memorize these four and you will never panic over a credit pull again.
These are the FICO ranges. VantageScore uses the same 300–850 scale but labels its tiers differently, which is one more reason to know which score you are looking at.
Now go find out where you actually stand. You do not have one credit score — you have dozens, and the free one on your phone may not be the one a lender pulls when you apply. Here is where to look, and what each source is really showing you.
The large majority of lending decisions run on FICO, so this is the group that counts. All four are free and none of them require you to be a customer.
Same 300–850 scale, different formula. Great for watching the trend line, not what an underwriter sees.
The score is the summary. The report is the data underneath it, and it is where you find the errors.