Help! Newbie needs help getting started!

[Anonymous]

Became a stay at home mom over ten years ago and basically gave all of the financial business over to the hubby EXCEPT for continuing to use MY credit cards. Well I recently started my own business and started "waking up" I guess you could call it and checking my scores. Apparently my bills have been being put on the back burner for quite some time. Don't get me wrong I'm not blaming anyone but myself for being in a cave for so long but I want to get on track asap and I want to get my score up asap. I have 4 credit cards at the time, one of which I discovered had been recently handed over to a collection agency. As soon as I started checking my scores about two months ago I got busy. I completely paid of the card that had been handed over to a collection agency and have caught up and am ahead on payments with my other three cards. My plan is to pay off the other three within the next two months hopefully. Is paying the balance completely off on all three cards what I need to do to raise my score? And also should I keep all of these cards open or close any of the accounts? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[Anonymous]

Keeping the card credit lines open would be better than closing the accounts. Also paying ON TIME and lowering your utilization of credit to 25% or below on a consistent basis will help improve your scores.

Search for threads about closing credit card accounts and utilization of available credit, you will learn much about using the accounts you have to your benefit !!

Welcome to the forums.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Jeff!  So this may sound like a silly question but would it be better for me to keep my utilization in the 25 percent and below range or would paying it down to zero, like I had planned within the next few months, be worse for my credit score?  Before reading these boards I would have thought that the obvious answer would be zero, but now I'm not sure what is best.