Most of us know that credit scores are important. Most of us also know why they are important. Without a good credit score, it’s hard to get loans for things like houses, cars, businesses, and credit cards. But, with credit scores comes a whole slug of myths. The following is a list of the more common ones:

Myth 1:  Closing Your Accounts Will Help Your Score: This is among the most common myths. It probably comes from the fact that opening a ton of accounts can hurt your score. But, once they are already open, closing them won’t help you: it can actually do the opposite. First of all, closing your accounts can make your credit history look much younger than it actually is. Closing your accounts can also diminish the amount of available credit you have. This will alter your used credit and available credit ratio, which can greatly subtract from your credit score.

Myth 2: Checking Your Credit Report Can Hurt Your Credit Score: A plethora of hard inquiries (when a lender pulls up your report because you are applying for credit from them) can potentially hurt your score: if you have several hard inquiries, you may look desperate to get hold of some credit. But, when you pull up your own score it is neither a hard inquiry nor anything that will affect your credit score negatively. In fact, you should check your report at least once a year, though two or three times is ideal. Doing this will help you sniff out errors and identity theft.

Myth 3: Shopping Around Will Hurt Your Score: As discussed in myth 2, hard inquiries can affect your credit score. However, the credit score calculations take into consideration the consumers desire to shop around. Thus, if you are looking for a house or a car and solicit many lenders in a 30 day period, all these inquiries will be lumped into one general inquiry. It’s not, however, a good idea to let your shopping around extend over a period of time. Doing this can hurt your score negatively.

Myth 4: Reducing Your Limit Can Help Your Score: Some people assume that asking their creditor to lower their credit limit will help their score, but, just as with Myth 1, this can also change your used credit to available credit ratio and lower your score. You are better off paying off your debt, and widening the gap between credit limit and credit used, rather than lowering your limits.

Myth 5: You Don’t Have to Use Credit Cards to Get a High Score: In order to have a credit score, you do have to have credit. Just opening a credit card isn’t enough to get you a good score: you have to use your credit card, pay off the balance, and demonstrate to lenders that you can use credit responsibly.

Myth 6: If You Don’t Pay Interest, Your Score Will Be Lower: While you do have to use your credit cards in order to build up credit, you don’t have to pay interest. If you pay your balance every month, rather than carrying a balance, your credit score will not be affected in a negative manner. In fact, if you can you should get in the habit of paying your balance each month. This will help keep your debt from ever getting out of control.

Myth 7: including a Statement in Your File can Help Your Score When You Have Disputes: By law, you do have the right to compose a statement that demonstrates your “side” of the story. However, this statement won’t get you very far, at least not when it comes to your credit score. With the technology currently used, credit scores are coded, and not yet able to take into consideration these kinds of statements.

Myth 8: If Your Closed Accounts Aren’t Listed as “Closed by Consumer” Your Score Will Go Down: People assume that if your accounts are closed, and do not read “closed by consumer,”  lenders will automatically assume that the account was closed because of a delinquency. But, this isn’t the case. First of all, lenders rarely ever see your actual report: they just go by your credit score. Second of all, if the account was closed by the lender, there would be a lot of paper work documenting this.

Myth 9: Debt Management Programs and Debt Settlement Programs are Worse Than Bankruptcy: This may be the biggest myth of all: in fact, a bankruptcy is the absolute worse thing you can have on your report. Nothing will lower your score quicker. Enrollment in a debt management program may prevent some lenders from extending credit to you while you’re on a debt management plan but once you’re off the debt management program, you shouldn’t have any problems getting loans.

A Debt settlement plan may temporarily decrease your credit score, but in the long run - as it helps you decrease the amount of debt you are in - your score will rebuild itself, most likely higher than it was.

There are many things that can affect your credit score, some more than others. But, the above are a list of things that don’t affect your score. Determining the myths from the facts is the best way to know how to keep your credit score high.