How can I check my credit score?
http://annualcreditreport.com/ That's the official site for getting your free yearly credit report (one free per year from each of the 3 reporting bureaus). Assuming you are asking about a credit score in the United States, the following applies. To find out your FICO score, navigate to AnnualCreditReport, the official site to help consumers receive their credit report from each of the three organizations providing these scores - Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.  You are - in many states - entitled to a free copy of your credit report from each of these organizations annually.   This copy of your credit report will not contain your credit score from that organization.  It will, however, contain information that goes into your credit score - the lines of credits on file, any delinquencies reported, etc. If you decide you would like to pay for your credit score from each bureau, you will have the option to receive this information while getting your credit report, but you will have to pay a nominal fee for it.  Remember that each of the 3 bureaus gives you a different score.  Averaging your 3 scores should give you a good idea of your FICO score.  Note that your report is far more important than your score - once you know that, you know if you're in a good place or not. These other questions are so close that they might even be considered duplicates, and provide other suggestions for how to check your score. As a warning, don't trust the many ads out there saying you can get your score for free.  Only AnnualCreditReport is considered a safe place for entering the very personal information required to get a score.  The FTC backs this up. Since no one else answered this part of your question yet:  Checking your own credit score or report will not affect it in any way.  It only hurts you when someone looks it up to run a credit check at your request for the purpose of possibly getting a loan, for example a car dealership. This only hurts it a tiny bit, and is not worth worrying about unless you are going to 20 different car dealerships who each do a check. However, it is a good idea not to let them run your credit until you are seriously ready to buy a car. In fact, it is better to just get financing somewhere else and not let them run it at all. "Different states have different laws, check your local laws concerning credit. Some states even guarantee you to get one free credit report per year. If you recently apply for an apartment, a mortgage or denied a credit card or loan, you can usually get a free copy from whomever you authorized to pull your credit report. Sign up credit monitoring service, there are quite a few of these. Most credit card companies offer such service, Amex, Chase, Citibank, etc. It' costs around $10-$20 per month. If you sign up a service and pull your own credit report, it's considered a ""soft"" pull which won't affect your score negatively." Check with your bank.  As of January, 2015, the following banks and credit unions are offering free credit-scores: Announced, in the pipeline: Source: Banks to offer FICO credit scores for free Personal Experience: I've been receiving free FICO score from my credit union for more than 6 months now. Advice: Most people have multiple bank/credit-union accounts. The FICO score will be the same whoever offers it. If none of your financial institutions offer you a free credit-score then you may opt for free services like creditkarma.com or other paid services. Please note that a credit-score is number summarizing your credit-report and should not be confused.  In the news:
"Unless you have a history of over-using credit (i.e. you've gotten yourself into debt trouble), then I think that the banker is giving you bad advice in telling you to get your own credit limit reduced.  Having more credit available to you that is left unused will make your utilization ratio lower, which is generally better for your credit score, according to this article on CreditKarma.com.  The ""sweet spot"" seems to be 1-20% utilization of your total credit.  (But remember, this is only one factor in your credit score, and not even the biggest-- having a long history of on-time payments counts the most.) My own personal experience seems to bear this out.  I have two major credit cards that I use.  One card has a high credit limit (high for me anyway) and I use it for just about everything that I buy-- groceries, gas, durable goods, services, you name it.  The other card has a limit that is about 1/3 of the first, and I use it for a few recurring bills and occasional purchases where they don't take the first card.  I also have a couple of department store cards that I use rather infrequently (typically 1 purchase every 3 months or so).  At the end of each month, when the respective statements post, each card has a balance that is 15% or less of the credit limit on that card.  I pay off the entire balance on each card each month, and the cycle repeats.  I have never been late on a payment, and my credit history for all of these cards goes back 10 years.  My credit score is nearly as high as it can go.  If having unused credit were a detriment, I would expect my score to be much lower. So, no, having ""too much credit available"" is not going to hurt you, unless you are not using it at all, or are tempted to abuse it (use too much).  The key is to use common sense.  Have a small number of cards, keep them active, spend within your means so you can pay off the balance in full after the statement posts, and never be late on your payments.  That's all it takes to have good credit." "I always hesitate to provide an answer to ""how does this affect my credit score?"" questions, because the credit agencies do not publish their formulas and the formulas do change over time. And many others have done more reverse engineering than I to figure out what factors do affect the scores. To some extent, there is no way to know other than to get your credit score and track it over time. (The credit report will tell you what the largest negative factors are.) However, let me make my prediction. You have credit, you aren't using a large percentage of it, and don't have defaults/late payments. So, yes, I think it would help your credit score and would build a history of credit. Since this is so unusual, this is just an educated guess." Good credit is calculated (by many lenders) by taking your FICO score which is calculated based upon what is in your credit report.  Building credit generally means building up your FICO score. Your FICO score is impacted my many factors, one small one of which is your utilization ratio of your installment loans like student loans.  This is the ratio of the current balance to your original balance.  To improve your score (slightly) you would want a lower ratio.  I would recommend paying your student loan down to 75% ratio as fast as you can and then you can go back to $50/month. A much better way to improve your FICO score is to have revolving credit.  Your student loans are not revolving, they are installment loans.  Therefore, you should open at least one credit card (assuming you currently have none) right away.  The longer you have had a credit card open, the better your FICO score gets.  Your revolving credit utilization ratio is way more important than your installment loan ratio.  Therefore, to maximize your FICO, try to never have more than 10% utilization on your revolving credit report to the credit bureaus each month.  Only the current month's ratio affects your score at any given moment.  You can ensure you don't go above 10% by paying your balance before the statement cuts each month to get it below 10% way before any payment would be due.  (You should always pay your remaining credit card statement balance in full each month by the due date after the statement cuts to avoid any interest charges.)  Note that there is a slight FICO advantage to having at least one major bank credit card instead of just only credit union credit cards.  Also, never let all your revolving credit report a zero balance in a month, you must always have at least $1 reporting to the credit bureaus on at least one of your open credit cards or your FICO score will take a big negative hit. If you cannot get a normal credit card, go to a credit union and find one that offers secured credit cards, or a bank that does.  A secured credit card is where you place a deposit with the bank that they hold and give you a credit limit to match your security.  Ideally it would be a card that graduates to unsecured after your demonstrate good history with them.  For example, the Navy Federal Credit Union secured card unsecures for many people.  I also believe the Wells Fargo Bank credit card (you can join if there is a family member who served or a roomate who did) also will unsecure.  The reason you want it to unsecure and not be forced to open a new account to get an unsecured account is that you want your average age and oldest age of open revolving credit accounts to be as high as possible as this is another impact on your FICO score. Credit unions that anyone can join include, Digital Federal Credit Union, the Pentagon Federal Credit Union (which offers a secured card that does not graduate), and The State Department Federal Credit Union (also offers secured card that I think does not graduate). One other method to boost your FICO score is to get added as an authorized user on one of your parent's credit cards that has been open a long time.  Not all lenders will report such an authorized user, however, ones that are known to do so are: Bank of America, Citi Bank, and Capital One.  It is a good sign that it will report if they ask for the social security number of the authorized user. However, note that the Authorized User addition can have no impact if the lender is using one of the newer versions of the FICO scoring model, only the older versions reward you for the age of accounts for which you are an authorized user. A very long term boost is to open your first American Express card underwritten directly by Amex such as their Zync card which is pretty easy to get.  The advantage of American express is that they remember the date your first credit card was opened with them and if you open new accounts in the future they will back date the date of their opening to match the date your first card was opened.  If you let your membership lapse, be sure to record the account number and date opened in your personal files so that you can help them locate it again if you reopen as they can have trouble if it has been on the order of ten years or more. Finally, note that the number of accounts opened in the last twelve months is a small negative mark on your score (along with number of inquiries), so if you open a lot of accounts all at once, in addition to bringing down your average age of accounts, you will also get dinged for how many were opened in the last year. "Trying to figure out how much money you have available each day sounds like you're making this more complicated than it needs to be. Unless you're extremely tight and you're trying to squeeze by day by day, asking ""do I have enough cash to buy food for today?"" and so on, you're doing too much work. Here's what I do. I make a list of all my bills. Some are a fixed amount every month, like the mortgage and insurance premiums. Others are variable, like electric and heating bills, but still pretty predictable.  Most bills are monthly, but I have a few that come less frequently, like water bills in my area come every 3 months and I have to pay property taxes twice a year. For these you have to calculate how much they cost each month. Like for the water bill, it's once every 3 months so I divide a typical bill by 3. Always round up or estimate a little high to be safe. Groceries are a little tricky because I don't buy groceries on any regular schedule, and sometimes I buy a whole bunch at once and other times just a few things. When groceries were a bigger share of my income, I kept track of what I spent for a couple of months to figure out an average per month. (Today I'm a little richer and I just think of groceries as coming from my spending money.) I allocate a percentage of my income for contributions to church and charities and count this just like bills. It's a good idea to put aside something for savings and/or paying down any outstanding loans every month. Then I add these up to say okay, here's how much I need each month to pay the bills. Subtract that from my monthly income and that's what I have for spending money. I get paid twice a month so I generally pay bills when I get paid. For most bills the due date is far enough ahead that I can wait the maximum half a month to pay it. (Worst case the bill comes the day after I pay the bills from this paycheck.)  Then I keep enough money in my checking account to, (a) Cover any bills until the next paycheck and allow for the particularly large bills; and (b) provide some cushion in case I make a mistake -- forget to record a check or make an arithmetic error or whatever; and (c) provide some cushion for short-term unexpected expenses. To be safe, (a) should be the total of your bills for a month, or as close to that as you can manage. (b) should be a couple of hundred dollars if you can manage it, more if you make a lot of mistakes. If you've calculated your expenses properly and only spend the difference, keeping enough money in the bank should fall out naturally. I think it's a lot easier to try to manage your money on a monthly basis than on a daily basis. Most of us don't spend money every day, and we spend wildly different amounts from day to day. Most days I probably spend zero, but then one day I'll buy a new TV or computer and spend hundreds.  Update in response to question What I do in real life is this: To calculate my available cash to spend, I simply take the balance in my checking account -- assuming that all checks and electronic payments have cleared. My mortgage is deducted from my checking every month so I post that to my checking a month in advance. I pay a lot of things with automatic charges to a credit card these days, so my credit card bills are large and can't be ignored. So subtract my credit card balances. Subtract my reserve amount. What's left is how much I can afford to spend. So for example: Say I look at the balance in my checkbook today and it's, say, $3000. That's the balance after any checks and other transactions have cleared, and after subtracting my next mortgage payment. Then I subtract what I owe on credit cards. Let's say that was $1,200. So that leaves $1,800. I try to keep a reserve of $1,500. That's plenty to pay my routine monthly bills and leave a healthy reserve. So subtract another $1,500 leaves $300. That's how much I can spend. I could keep track of this with a spreadsheet or a database but what would that gain? The amount in my checking account is actual money. Any spreadsheet could accumulate errors and get farther and farther from accurate values. I use a spreadsheet to figure out how much spending money I should have each month, but that's just to use as a guideline. If it came to, say, $100, I wouldn't make grandiose plans about buying a new Mercedes. If it came to $5,000 a month than buying a fancy new car might be realistic. It also tells me how much I can spend without having to carefully check balances and add it up. These days I have a fair amount of spending money so when, for example, I recently decided I wanted to buy some software that cost $100 I just bought it with barely a second thought. When my spending money was more like $100 a month, lunch at a fast food place was a big event that I planned weeks in advance. (Obviously, I hope, don't get stupid about ""small amounts"". If you can easily afford $100 for an impulse purchase, that doesn't mean that you can afford $100 five times a day every day.) Two caveats: 1. It helps to have a limited number of credit cards so you can keep the balances under control. I have two credit cards I use for almost everything, so I only have two balances to keep track of. I used to have more and it got confusing, it was easy to lose track of how much I really owed, which is a set up for getting in trouble." In addition to the already good answers: I am assuming you are playing a long game and have no specific need for a high credit score in the next couple of years.  This list is just good practice that will raise you score. It is COMPLETELY no use to pay earlier (during a billing cycle) to better your credit score! Your credit score gets affected ONLY once a month from each creditor, and that happens when they post your monthly statement. Thus, no matter what you do or pay and how many times a month or how many days earlier than your due date, it has NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on your score. Anything you do will be reflected only after the statement. What you pay in between those two statements is irrelevant. So, as far as credit score goes IT DOESN'T MATTER. However, if you want to save on interest being charged, it is wise to pay as early as possible, so your balance is as low as possible for day-by-day calculation of your interest. You can view Standard & Poor's credit ratings here:  http://www.standardandpoors.com/ratings/en/us/ You have to register with S&P to access the ratings. Depends on your credit score. If you came from foreign country, you might not be having enough Credit Score.  In that case, you have to go for Prepaid Credit Card offered by Banks. For prepaid credit card,you have to deposit certain amount of money which will act as your credit line.