Plus, you want to consider paying off loans early if you can. Having a car loan paid in full on your credit report is better than having one with payments still to be made.

Looking for a tip on managing amounts owed? Here’s two:

1. Pay off your balances twice per month, on your payday. Heck, you get paid twice per month. You might as well pay off expenses twice per month as well. Why does this help? If you pay your balance off twice per month, you have an opportunity to reduce the balance figure reported to the bureaus. A $1000 balance could be half paid before the issuer reports to the credit bureau, so now $500 balance is reported. This helps your credit utilization ratio and improves your credit score
2. You can get set the closing date for your credit card and make payments ahead of that date. Your credit cards have due dates and closing dates. Let’s say those are the 15th and the 5th, respectively. If you make a payment on the 12th each month, you are reducing the amount reported as a balance and it has the same impact as discussed in #1.

If you don’t want to do these things, you should consider using your credit a bit less until you are in the 10% credit utilization range.

Finally, you can impact your CUR by having your credit limits raised. This is getting harder now as many companies are starting to reduce credit limits, but it’s still worth a shot.

At 30% of the credit score factors pie, amounts owed should be carefully managed.  Remember that along with Payment history, these two factors are 65% of your credit score.

Post from: Video Credit Score

Amounts Owed: 30% of your Credit Score – Episode #82