Your FICO Score

Credit scores affect whether you can get credit and what you pay for credit cards, auto loans, mortgages and other kinds of credit. For most kinds of credit scores, higher scores mean you are more likely to be approved and pay a lower interest rate on new credit. Here is some advice about the impact on your FICO score of late payments or over-extending yourself.

We all know that making late payments and maxing out our credit lines hurt credit scores, but how much? Recently the folks at FICO, whose scores are used by virtually all lenders, have revealed the actual penalties.

If your FICO score is 680:

If those same missteps are made by someone who has a FICO score of 780 or above, the reduction in score could be about 50 percent higher.