So you have some extra money in your pocket and you’ve decided to pay off one of your credit card collections early. You know that credit scores are extremely important so your goal is to pay off the collection that will yield the most credit score improvement — the “FICO ROI” (return on investment).

Get a credit card with a high limit, keep the balance low and use the credit card to establish a credit history or boost a low credit score. Remember — the more available credit on a credit card, the better.

Good credit takes patience and persistence and if you pay your bills on time and keep your credit card balances low over the long haul, you’ll be rewarded with a solid score.

Learning how to recognize credit repair scams will save you pain and money. The scammers promise to remove negative information from your Credit Report, so that you can be approved for future credit. They can’t deliver on those promises, and the fee you pay to them is lost. The good news is that these scams follow the same patterns, so once you understand how they work, you can avoid them.

Borrowing money today requires impressing an increasingly hard-to-please crowd. With creditors of all kinds more cautious than ever, you need an A+ application to land the best terms — and that means an A+ credit score, the number lenders use to judge your risk of default.