Your credit score report can be affect by more than your available credit history. We talk about how credit cards, mortgages, car loans, and any type of loan that reports to all 3 credit bureaus will affect your credit score. We don’t always talk about utility companies and how they can have a negative impact on your credit report. Here are utility companies I like to consider non-creditors. In other words these companies don’t give you a line credit, they just provide a service.

You need to have a firm understanding of the minimum credit score for auto loan — applying for a car loan without such basic knowledge will hurt your chances.

Identity theft is a form of stealing someone’s identity in which someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person’s identity, typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits in that person’s name. The victim of identity theft (here meaning the person whose identity has been assumed by the identity thief) can suffer adverse consequences if they are held accountable for the perpetrator’s actions.

Credit card issuers are ramping up lending to consumers with poor credit but borrowers beware — the terms aren’t always going to be good. Lending to subprime consumers — typically those with a FICO credit score of below 660 — climbed 41% last year, with banks issuing 1.1 million new credit cards to riskier consumers, a four-year high, according to a recent report from credit reporting agency Equifax.

Debt settlement, also known as debt arbitration, debt negotiation or credit settlement, is an approach to debt reduction in which the debtor and creditor agree on a reduced balance that will be regarded as payment in full.