Your Checking Account And Your Credit Score

When talking about ways to build and maintain a good credit rating history, most people will refer to loan payment ad credit cards.

While it is true that these two aspects can influence your credit report a in big way, you should be also be aware that your checking account is also considered in the calculation of your credit score.

Your credit report also contains information on how you use your checking account, so any bounced cheque will affect your score in a negative way.

If you write a cheque when you do not have sufficient funds in the account to cover it, your cheque will bounce and this information will be recorded in your credit report and it will stay there for seven years.

This can have very bad consequences: probably you won't be unable to open another bank account and stores will not accept payment fro you by cheque.

Therefore, it is therefore very important that you should learn to manage this account in such a way as to make it contribute to your good credit score.

The following paragraphs outline some basic guidelines on how to operate your account.

First and foremost, you should always know how much money you have in your checking account. Unless you are some world famous magnate, you should remember that even slightly exceeding the amount of money available will make the bank return the cheque to the payee and cause a bad mark to be added to your credit report.

To avoid bounce cheques, you should reconcile your account balance every month, upon receipt of your statement of account from the bank. The statement should contain simple instructions on the back to guide you through the process.

Because it is usually easier to open a second account than to set up a new one. Therefore, it is advisable that, if you want to close the account you have and open another one, you should keep the old one until after the new one is opened.

Before you withdraw any money from the old account or transfer it to the new one, make sure all the outstanding cheques pointing to the old one are paid.

After you reconcile your account, look again for any check numbers that are not yet cleared and, if there are any, find out why they haven’t been presented for payment. If you close the account and the payee tries to cash the cheque, it will bounce.

By following these simple guidelines, you can make sure that your checking account does not have any bad influence on your credit report.