Having a copy of your credit score can most often mean the difference between going deeper into debt and getting out of it. Because most people do not keep track of their credit score, they often go into deep debt without even realizing it. Every time you are late making payments to a creditor or skip one all together, you are subjected to loosing points on your credit score. Your credit score is used to show creditors and lenders how much they can trust you to pay back your loans and/or purchases when credit is being offered. If your credit score is low, creditors are less likely to offer you credit because it shows that you are a higher risk customer.

Creditors have access to computers that will report all of your credit habits and transactions such as: bill paying, credit card payments, missed and skipped payments, and debt. The more you miss payments, the lower your score gets. The average person usually starts with a credit score of about 800 and every time you skip or miss payments, that number gets lower.

Once that credit score gets to a certain low number, usually around 500 or so, is when a lot of people will file for bankruptcy. When they do this these creditors are automatically paid in full, but the bankruptcy stays on your credit report. There is one type of debt that bankruptcy will not clear and that is any money that is owed to the government from taxes or student loans etc. Filing for bankruptcy should not be used for this.

Keeping track of your credit score is necessary these days because that score can go down faster than you can imagine. When you keep up to date with your credit score you can prevent it from getting to the danger point which is 500 or less and you can save yourself a lot of trouble later on like when you want to buy a house. Ideally you should try to keep your credit score at 700 or higher but 650 is still decent. If you want to get a copy of your credit score, you can visit http://www.equifax.com and use the credit report to get your credit back to where it should be.

Your credit score is the best thing that you can do to avoid bankruptcy for all of the reason I mentioned above. Why wouldn’t you get a copy of your credit score if that was an assured method for you to be able to avoid going bankrupt? When you correct all of your credit problems beforehand, you can be sure that bankruptcy will not be an option.