This one sounds logical, especially when a mortgage broker tells you that lenders are suspicious of people who have lots of unused credit available to them. What’s to keep you, after all, from rushing out and charging up a storm?

Of course, if you think about it, what’s kept you from racking up big balances before now? If you’ve been pretty responsible with credit in the past, you’re likely to continue to be pretty responsible in the future. That’s the basic principle behind credit scoring: It rewards behaviors that show moderate, responsible use of credit over time, because those habits are likely to continue.

The score also punishes behavior that’s not so responsible, such as applying for a bunch of credit you don’t need. Many people with high credit scores find that one of the few marks against them is the number of credit accounts listed on their reports. When they go to get their credit scores, they’re told that one of the reasons their score isn’t even higher is that they have “too many open accounts.” Many erroneously assume they can “fix” this problem by closing accounts.

But after you’ve opened the accounts, you’ve done the damage. You can’t undo it by closing the account.

You can, however, make matters worse. Closing accounts can hurt you in two ways:

This is true whether or not you keep a balance on your credit cards or pay them off in full every month. Remember: The FICO formula doesn’t differentiate between balances that are carried and those that are paid off.

In reality, closing revolving credit accounts can never help your score, and it might hurt it.

Every time I write this fact, I get flooded with letters from mortgage brokers insisting I’m wrong. But every time Fair Isaac has investigated a case where a lending professional claimed a closure helped a score, it discovered that some other factor was actually responsible.

Sometimes the change was fairly obvious, such as a negative mark that passed the seven-year limitation and was dropped from the report. More often, the difference in scores was the result of something subtler, such as lower balances being reported on the borrower’s accounts or the simple passage of time. (Remember: The longer it’s been since you opened your first account and your last account, and the longer you’ve been paying on time, the better the effect on your score.)

This doesn’t mean that you should never close a credit card or other revolving account. You might want to get rid of a card that’s charging you an annual fee or shut down a few unused accounts to reduce the chances they could be hijacked by an identity thief. If your FICO score is already in the mid-700s or higher, you should be fine closing a few accounts—so long as they’re not your oldest or highest-limit cards. Otherwise, though, you’d be smart just to leave those accounts open until your score improves.

There are other good reasons to close accounts. If you have a serious spending problem, you might find cutting up and canceling your credit cards is the only way to keep yourself in line. If that’s true, your credit score is probably the least of your worries.

You also might encounter one of those lenders who is spooked by open credit card accounts and demands that you close some. If the loan is big enough, like a mortgage, and the lender has already committed to giving you the money, you might have to take the risk to get your loan. But don’t close accounts as a preemptive measure and endanger your score.

This one is a variation on the idea that reducing your available credit somehow helps your score by making you seem less risky to lenders. Once again, it’s off the mark.

Narrowing the gap between the credit you use and the credit you have available to you can have a negative effect on your score. It doesn’t matter that you asked for the reduction; the FICO formula doesn’t distinguish between lower limits that you requested and lower limits imposed by a creditor. All it sees is less space between your balances and your limits, and that’s not good.

If you want to help your score, tackle the problem from the other end: by paying down your debt. Increasing the gap between your balance and your credit limit has a positive effect on your score.

Hans, a doctor, emailed me in a panic after talking with his lender:

“I heard from our mortgage officer at our state employees’ credit union that if you access your credit report too often—even just to clean it up—that it looks unfavorable to lenders. How can I then run a check safely to clean it up in preparation for our ‘dream home’ mortgage?”

Shortly after receiving that email, I received this perky little admonition from Lisa in East Wenatchee, Washington—yet another misinformed “expert”:

“As a real estate agent with 20+ years of sales experience, I appreciate the information you shared [on CNBC today] with the home-buying consumer. However, your advice for the consumer to check their ‘credit report often...’ needs to be modified. Each and every time consumers check their credit reports, it actually lowers their credit scores! I have had clients check their credit on a weekly basis, only to have their FICO scores lowered by as much as 50 points!!!”

No amount of exclamation points makes it so, Lisa. Next to the myth about closing accounts, the myth that you can hurt your score just by checking your credit report seems to be the most pervasive—and potentially destructive.

You need to check your credit report and your score fairly frequently to make sure all is right with your financial world. Checking once a year is about the minimum; given the prevalence of identity theft, you might want to check in with all three bureaus at least twice a year. You should definitely pull all three reports and scores a few months before applying for new credit, because it can take awhile to correct any errors you find.

The folks at Fair Isaac understand your need to review your own data, which is why the FICO formula ignores any inquiries generated when you check your own reports and scores.

Where you can hurt yourself is if you ask a lender to check your score. When a lender pulls your credit, it generates what’s known as “hard” inquiry—and those are counted against your score.

As long as you order from a credit bureau or a service affiliated with a bureau, such as MyFico.com, your inquiries won’t hurt your score.

The folks propagating this particular myth might have an ulterior motive. After all, if you don’t know what the competition is offering, how will you know whether you got a good deal?

Creators of scoring formulas know that smart consumers want to shop around for the best rates, particularly on cars and homes. That’s why the FICO formula ignores all mortgage- and auto-related inquiries made within the preceding 30 days. If the formula finds any inquiries before that period, it lumps together any auto- or mortgage-related ones made within a certain period. (Older versions of the FICO formula use a 14-day period, whereas newer versions use 45 days.) In effect, if you had six mortgage inquiries and three auto inquiries within that time frame, the formula would count only two inquiries total. So if you do your shopping for a car loan or mortgage in a concentrated period of time and get the loan before the 30-day window is up, you should be fine. Even if it takes a little longer than 30 days to get your loan approved, as often happens with mortgages, you should be okay if your rate shopping was confined to a 2-week period.

What you don’t want to do is drag out the process over several weeks or apply for credit cards right before you plan to get a mortgage or a car loan. The “deduplification” process—that’s what Fair Isaac calls it—only gives special treatment to inquiries that are car- or mortgage-related. You’d also be wise not to shop for car loans while you’re looking for a mortgage, or vice versa, because the formula lumps mortgage and auto inquiries separately.

You can protect yourself further and make the shopping process easier by doing some research before you contact any lenders. Get your reports and scores so that you know where you stand, and then check Internet sites, such as MyFico.com or Bankrate.com, to see the kind of rates you can expect to get, given your score. That way you’ll be able to tell a good deal from a bad one when it’s offered.

By the way, speaking of bad deals, you should be careful not to give any credit or other personal financial information to a car dealership until you’re ready to buy the car. Readers have reported finding dozens of inquiries on their credit reports after having casually visited a dealership or two. Although multiple inquiries made on the same day might not affect your score that much because they’re all lumped together by the FICO formula, a page of inquiries might unnerve any lender who actually looks at your report.

People who have poor credit need to be particularly vigilant about inquiries. Although someone who has a good score might lose 5 points or so from a single inquiry, the impact can be greater for someone who has a troubled, sparse, or brief credit history. Repeatedly trying for loans and being turned down can take a toll on your score over time. Just read what happened to Chris in Asheville, North Carolina:

“Over the years, as I have struggled with my credit, I have tried several times to buy a car. Each time I have applied for credit, the car lot has run my credit at about 15 different [lenders] trying to get me a loan. Multiply this over the last two years (I know that’s how long inquiries stay on your report) times two cars per year, and I have about a page and a half of inquiries. Now, this has had a dramatic effect on my credit score.”

Actually, it’s highly unlikely that inquiries alone are devastating Chris’ score. It’s more likely that his past credit troubles are still having an effect. But Chris certainly isn’t making things better. Rather than give his score a chance to recover and improve, he keeps trying every six months, inflicting fresh injury.

Because his score is already poor, each new inquiry or group of inquiries is likely to hurt more than it might had he enjoyed a better score.

A better course for Chris and others who have poor scores is to give up on the idea of a car loan for a while and concentrate on improving their FICOs. Paying their bills on time, paying down any debt they have, and getting and using a secured credit card should help their scores. After their numbers are out of the cellar, they can shop for loans without drastically impacting their scores.

Some people are so suspicious of credit that they advise giving up credit cards and living on a cash-only basis. They acknowledge that most people need mortgages and auto loans, but they feel the best way to impress a lender is by living a credit-free life.

Now that you know something about how credit scoring works, you can see the holes in this theory. The credit-scoring formula is designed to judge how well you handle credit over time. If you have no credit, or you don’t at least occasionally use the credit you have, the formula won’t have enough information to make an assessment. You don’t have to live in debt to get a decent score, but you do need to use credit.

In the past, some people were able to get high credit scores without having much credit. Earlier incarnations of the FICO credit score gave scores over 700 to some people with just one or two recently opened accounts. The newer versions of the formula, however, make it much tougher to get a lofty score if you have a thin credit history.

You probably need to be concerned about your score even if you have no plans to take out loans. Now that insurers are using credit information for underwriting and rating decisions, your failure to maintain a credit history could cost you in the form of higher premiums.

It’s too bad that conscientious people who simply don’t like debt should be punished with higher premiums, and some states have even banned insurers from using a lack of credit history as a reason to raise rates. If your state hasn’t prohibited the practice, though, you might want to dust off your credit card and use it once in awhile.

This is the exact opposite of the preceding myth, and it’s just as misguided.

You don’t need to carry a balance on your credit cards and pay interest to have a good score. As you’ve read several times already, your credit reports—and thus the FICO formula—make no distinction between balances you carry month to month and balances that you pay off. Smart consumers don’t carry credit card balances for any reason, and certainly not to improve their scores.

Now, it is true that to get the highest FICO scores, you need to have both revolving accounts, such as credit cards, and installment loans, such as a mortgage or car loan. And with the exception of those 0 percent rates used to push auto sales after September 11, most installment loans require paying interest.

But here’s a news flash: You don’t need to have the very highest score to get good credit. Any score over 720 or so is going to get you the best rates and terms with many lenders. Some, particularly auto and home equity lenders, reserve their best deals for those with scores over 760. You don’t have to have an 850, or even 800 score, to get great deals.

If you’re trying to improve a mediocre score, a small, affordable installment loan can help—provided that you can get approved for it and pay it off on time. But otherwise there’s no reason to get yourself into debt and pay interest.

Dave in Los Angeles wound up in a protracted fight with his phone company, which for months billed him for a phone line that, in fact, never worked. He went round and round with the company’s technical service, customer service, and billing department. Finally, he gave up, refusing to pay the bill—even when it went into collections and onto his credit report. Dave figured he could offset the damage to his credit by sending the credit bureaus a 100-word statement explaining the problem.

Federal law does give you the right to have such statements attached to your credit file. Unfortunately, the credit-scoring formula can’t read—at least not in the traditional sense. It calculates scores based on how items on your credit report are coded, and these 100-word statements aren’t coded at all, so they’re not counted.

It’s not clear how helpful such statements were before credit scoring became so widespread, but they’re certainly not much help now.

Given how damaging late payments, collections, and other recent negative marks are on your score, you want to avoid them if at all possible. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to give in and pay a bill that’s clearly in error. But you also shouldn’t let a $30 spat with your book club escalate into a collection that could trash your score. You might have to pay the bill under protest and then sue the vendor in small claims court.

Fortunately, most credit disputes can be solved well short of that. If you used a credit card to purchase something that didn’t work, you can use the credit card company’s dispute-resolution process as outlined on the back of your statements. Patient, polite persistence with a company’s customer service department can also help, as can a willingness to seek out supervisors or regulators who might be able to cut through a log jam.

If the collection has already landed on your report, follow the steps in Chapter 7, “Rebuilding Your Score After a Credit Disaster,” to minimize or eliminate the impact.

The theory behind this myth is that lenders will see a closed account on your credit report and, if not informed otherwise, will assume that a disgusted creditor cut you off because you screwed up somehow.

Of course, as you know by now, many lenders never see your actual report. They’re just looking at your credit score, which couldn’t care less who closed a credit card. Fair Isaac figures that if a lender shuts down your account, it’s either for inactivity or because you defaulted. If you defaulted, that will be amply documented in the account’s history.

If it makes you feel better to contact the bureaus and ensure that accounts you closed are listed as “closed by consumer,” by all means do so. But it won’t make any difference to your credit score.

Sometimes this is phrased as “credit counseling is as bad as bankruptcy” or “credit counseling is as bad as Chapter 13 bankruptcy.” None of these statements is true.

A bankruptcy filing is the single worst thing you can do to your credit score. By contrast, the current FICO formula completely ignores any reference to credit counseling that might be on your credit report. Credit counseling is treated as a neutral factor, neither helping nor harming your score.

Credit counselors, in case you’re not familiar with the term, specialize in negotiating lower interest rates and working out payment plans for debtors that might otherwise file for bankruptcy. Although credit counselors might consolidate the consumer’s bills into one monthly payment, they don’t offer loans—as debt consolidators do—or promise to eliminate or settle debts for less than the principal amount you owe.

The fact that credit counseling itself won’t affect your score does not mean, however, that enrolling in a credit counselor’s debt management plan will leave your credit unscathed.

Some lenders will report you as late just for enrolling in a debt management plan. Their reasoning is that you’re not paying them what you originally owed, so you should have to suffer some pain.

That’s not the only way you could be reported late. As you’ll read in the next chapter, not all credit counselors are created equal, and some have been accused of withholding consumer payments that were intended for creditors. The missing payments showed up as “lates” on the consumers’ credit reports, hurting their scores.

Finally, some lenders—particularly mortgage lenders—do indeed view current participation in a credit counseling program as the equivalent of a Chapter 13 bankruptcy. If they see it mentioned on a credit report, they won’t extend credit as long as the notation of credit counseling remains on the borrower’s file. But typically such notations are dropped as soon as the borrower completes the repayment plan. By contrast, a Chapter 13 bankruptcy can be reported for seven years or more. (A Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which involves erasing your debts rather than retiring them with a repayment plan, stays on your report for up to ten years.)

Credit counseling isn’t something you should sign up for just because you want a lower interest rate or one place to send your payments instead of many. But, if you’re behind on your debts or able to pay only the minimums, and you want an alternative to bankruptcy, you shouldn’t stay away because of myths about its long-term impact on your credit.

Bankruptcy does deal a devastating blow to your score, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get credit afterward.

How quickly you’ll reestablish credit and how much you’ll pay for it will depend largely on your behavior after you file for bankruptcy. If you start handling credit responsibly—paying your bills on time, not running up big balances, and not applying for a bunch of credit at once—your score will begin to recover.

But it also will matter which lenders you approach for credit. Most mainstream lenders shun people who have filed for bankruptcy—sometimes just for the first few years, although sometimes for as long as the bankruptcy remains on your file.

Other lenders, though, may be willing to give you a chance. Before the credit crunch, it was fairly easy for people who filed bankruptcy to get new credit.

John, a military man stationed in Texas, said he and his wife were able to buy a house one year after their Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing and were approved for other accounts, including a credit card and a cell phone. Buying a car has proved more of a challenge:

“It doesn’t seem like my credit score is increasing at all. I say that because I applied to buy a Jeep last week and got turned down. A couple of months ago, I tried to buy a motorcycle and was turned down. What else can I do to increase my score?”

Actually, the couple’s credit scores probably were increasing—they just hadn’t gotten high enough for a mainstream auto lender to take a chance. Chris of Knoxville tried a different approach after filing for bankruptcy along with his wife:

“About two months after our discharge, we tried to buy a used car. We tried about five different banks and were turned down by each one,” Chris wrote. “A couple of months later, Saturn was having a ‘second-chance’ type of sale [for people with troubled credit]. We were able to purchase at a higher interest rate. We were a little disappointed [at the rate] but grateful that we were able to purchase a nice family car to rebuild our credit.”

Corey of Hermitage, Tennessee, filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Within two years, Corey had graduated from secured credit cards (which require a deposit) to regular credit cards and auto loans:

“Sure, it has been very hard to get credit sometimes. The only credit card I could get [at first] was one from Providian Financial, and even then it had to be a secured one; however, the pain has been worth it. I have since turned that secured credit card into an unsecured one. Providian issued me another [card], and then Merrick Bank issued me one. I have also been able to acquire two car loans, my most recent one for my 2001 Nissan Xterra for $23,000 and at a 10 percent interest rate.

The rates on my car loan and credit card could be better; however, I have no financial debt now other than my car and student loans, and I even have a great-paying job with some money in the bank now.”

These days, people with a bankruptcy on their record may need more patience. Far fewer lenders cater to those with troubled credit, so rebuilding credit can take more time. For more information about how best to rebuild after bankruptcy or other credit disaster, see Chapter 6, “Coping with a Credit Crisis.”