Control Your Money - Get A Good Credit Score

Getting good credit is easy to say and can be REALLY difficult to do.  Here are the basics:

• Pay your bills on time - late payments bring down your credit report
• Pay down your debt - the more debt you have, the riskier it is loan you more money and that is shown by a lower credit report
• Don't have too many credit cards - credit cards are like soft debt, you may not actually owe money but you could at the drop of a hat
• Pay off your credit cards - technically this is just part of paying down your debt but it's worth saying

Like I said, easy to say and difficult to do.  Nobody wants to give up things and/or lower their standard of living. My experience is that people (or maybe just me) tend to adjust to a raised standard of living in about 10 minutes but may never really adjust to a lowered standard of living.  I think it's human nature.  If you used to have more stuff and now you don't, you miss it.

All is not lost, however.  There are things you can do to lower your expenses without really lowering your standard of living.  The main one is being in control of your money.  I mean having a budget and sticking to it.  If you know where your money is going, you can (possibly) reduce or eliminate quite a few expenses without it really impacting your standard of living.

At the end of the day, you have to spend less than you make.  This is also easy to say and hard to do but, if you can pull it off, good credit will follow.