The Amounts You Owe

One of the many considerations that go into calculating your credit score are amounts owed. This is typically calculated as the ratio of the number of accounts with outstanding balances to the proportion of account balances to credit limits.

One of the best ways to improve scoring in this category is to keep your credit card and other "revolving credit" account utilization low. Having high outstanding debt will hurt your overall credit score.

Another way to improve your score in this category is to pay off debt as opposed to shifting it around. Paying down revolving credit is the most constructive way to increase your score in this category.

Finally, try and keep your utilization below 30%. In other words, make sure that if your total credit availability is $10,000, do not carry a total balance of more than $3,000 across all of your available credit accounts.  Knowing this, it is often said to be positive to have a greater number of accounts so that you can raise your overall credit availability while lowering your overall credit utilization!