Now you have me wondering...I know revolving credit definitely affects it. I have one installment loan myself and have kept balances on credit cards at zero nearly every month and my scores have gone up over consistently each month (except for those when I played with balances between 3% and 20% I guess) and figured the installment loan shrinking and lowering my debt to credit ratio was part of raising my scores. Heather knows a lot about raising scores, hopefully she can chime in and confirm some of this for us.
Right, that's why it's important to keep your revolving credit debt low, especially if you carry installment loans. Having higher limits and lower balances on your credit cards gives you the opportunity to improve upon that debt-to-credit ratio.
So I spur of the moment decided to apply for my first real credit card and got approved for a $1,300 line. The factors most limiting to my credit are total number of accounts, average length of accounts, and hard inquires. I'm very tempted to go and apply for another card to help remedy the first two issues, but it's almost a catch-22 because I really just have way too many hard inquires on my report. Not sure what to do...
