One of the worst things you can do to ruin your financial livelihood is to not maintain your credit. These easy steps can help raise a low score and keep a good score high.

Pay Your Bills on Time

You should already be doing this anyway, but paying your bills late – or not at all – can severely damage your credit score fast. That means you need to make at least the minimum payment on any credit card, mortgage or car loans every month, and on time.

Keep in mind that other bills can show up on credit reports, too. While utility, cell phone, cable and rent don’t normally show up on credit reports, they can lower your score if you’re more than 30 days late on a payment.

Keep Your Balances Low

How much credit you have available through credit cards can directly influence your credit score. One aspect that goes into determining your credit score is the amount of debt you have compared to the total amount of credit you have available.

A good rule of thumb is to never have a balance of more than 35% of your total credit limit on each credit card. Having a balance larger than that percentage can significantly hurt your credit score. That means if you have a card with a $1,000 limit, you should try not to have more than $350 for long periods of time.

Don’t Close Unused Accounts

Another Factor that affects a credit score is how long your credit history is. That means that the longer you have had a card open, the better it looks. Creditors like to see that you have a long history of paying your bills on time, and if you close accounts, this history is removed.

Keeping this in mind, if you have a large number of cards that you don’t regularly use, it is better to put them aside and just continue to let them go unused rather than close them. Just remember that it’s not good to have a large amount of credit cards open at any time. You should at most have five or six credit cards at any given time. Even if you do have that many, you should try to only use two or three of them ion a regular basis.

You may be wondering what is a good credit score. If so, then maybe you need credit repair.