4 Ways to Protect Your Credit Score This Holiday Season

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It’s a little bit too easy to lose all sense of reason in the holidays, happily proclaiming that you’ll “just put it on the card!” or that you’ll “pay it off in January!”

Sound familiar?

The bad news is that all of the frivolous holiday spending can have a negative impact on your credit score.

The good news is that there are easy ways to fix or prevent this. Let’s take a look!

Watch Your Balances Closely

When you’ve started to spend a lot of money in the holiday season, it can easily escalate into spending a LOT of money – and a lot more than you realized.

There are so many things to spend money on during the holidays – gifts, decorations, travel, food and more!

It’s important (at any time of the year) to keep a close eye on your spending amounts.

You don’t want to spend more money than you have, but if you are putting it on credit, you need to be aware of what it could be doing to your credit score.

Have you heard of credit utilization? It’s a factor in determining your credit score, which looks at how close your credit balance is to your limit.

Once it gets to around 30% you will see negative impacts on your score.

Stay Away From Retail Credit Cards!

When you’re at the checkout and you’re offered a discount on the thing that you’re buying and future purchases…it’s all too tempting to agree to that store card.

And you know what? It could be a good idea if that’s somewhere that you shop regularly and could benefit from the savings.

If you’re signing up to use it because you want to buy on credit, this is something that you need to avoid.

Don’t Miss Any Payments

The holiday season is pretty hectic, isn’t it? It feels like you’re running around like a crazy person doing a million different things at a million different places.

With all of the craziness that’s going on, it can be tough to stay on top of your finances.

Be your own best friend and set up systems to help you stop missing those payments.

Speak to your bank and see what they offer to help you with payment alerts. If they don’t offer anything, you could set up calendar alerts to remind you to pay on that day.

Be Like Santa and Double-Check

We love a good Santa pun! Santa checks his list twice, and we advise that you do the same – with your credit score that is.

Be sure to check on your credit score frequently to see if there is any fraudulent activity on it.

The crooks are getting better at doing it through online shopping, so when your spending is higher than normal, keep an eye on your purchases to make sure that they are really you.