Tips on Keeping Your Credit Line Intact

Here are some tips on keeping your credit line intact. Your location and spending habits are being scrutinized these days, and you can be penalized for living in a state with a high foreclosure rate. If your credit line is reduced, it affects your FICO score and nobody wants that!



My shiny new credit card still retains a zero balance. My rationale for getting a credit card is primarily for emergencies; since I want to put as much money as possible toward paying off my private loans, I don't always have a ton of ready cash in checking. I prefer to retain the savings that I have in the event of major disasters; you know, root canals and that kind of thing.



I go back and forth between using cash and my debit card; sometimes I work exclusively with cash, save for regularly scheduled monthly payments. Other times I have no cash and am too lazy to go to my bank. It only has a few cash machines, so I tend to get cash back when I go to the store, rather than paying a $2 fee every time at the cash machine. While $2 isn't very much, if you use a cash machine every week, that's over $100 in fees annually that I don't need to incur. At current rates that's two tanks of gas for my old compact car. With my typical driving patterns, that's gas for a month.