5 Things You Won't Believe Hurt Your Credit Score

Deciphering your credit score can be difficult, especially if you don't know all the ways you can be hurting it. Your credit is not only attached to your credit card use, but with many everyday financial activities. Here are five things that can hurt your credit, and ways to prevent them from happening to you.

1. Closing a Credit Card Account

The act of closing a credit card account doesn't hurt your score in and of itself. What it can do, however, is lower your credit utilization ratio, which determines about 30 percent of your FICO score, according to FICO. Let's say, for instance, you have two credit cards, both of which have a $5,000 credit limit, giving you $10,000 of overall credit. If you owe $2,500, your credit utilization ratio — which determines how much credit you are currently using — would be 25 percent, a healthy figure. However, if you closed one of your accounts, your credit utilization would shoot up to 50 percent, negatively affecting your credit score.

If you do decide to close an account, make sure your utilization ratio will stay below 30 percent once the account is closed.

2. Applying For New Credit

When you apply for a new line of credit, whether it's for a credit card or an auto loan, the credit issuer will run a hard inquiry on your credit report. Having too many hard inquiries on your credit report at one time can lead to a decline in your score, and can also severely affect it if you apply for multiple lines of credit in a short time frame. It's best to only apply for credit when you need it.

Also, only apply for cards that you know you can qualify for. If you get declined for five cards before getting approved, that's six hard inquiries on your credit report, which will drag down your score. Check out this list of the best credit cards for every credit score to get a better idea of which credit cards are best for you.

3. Renting a Car With a Debit Card

This is all assuming that the car rental service allows you to rent with a debit card. Some don't. At first glance this might seem odd since you're not paying with credit. However, some agencies will check your credit report if you decide to pay by debit card. The rental agency might see it as a red flag that you aren't using a credit card, so they're going to check and see if you can be trusted. It'll count as a hard inquiry and could cost a few points on your score.

4. Financing a Major Purchase

If a furniture or electronics store offers to let you finance a major purchase, like a couch or a flat-screen TV, think twice about it. Some store financing can be considered a "last-resort loan," which can make you look like a credit risk. Any financing will also result in a hard inquiry on your credit report.

If you want to make a large purchase but don't want to pay for it all at once, consider putting it on a new credit card instead of getting store financing. Many credit cards now offer a 0% intro APR for up to 18 months, which means you won't have to pay interest on the purchase for a year and a half. It will also raise your credit utilization ratio, since you are taking on more credit. These cards are now offering the 0% intro APR for 18 months deal.

5. Not Paying a Parking Ticket

You might think you pulled a fast one on the local municipality by not paying a parking ticket, but they might have the last laugh. Some cities, including New York and Chicago, send your unpaid tickets to collections agencies. Your credit score can take a severe beating if you have an account in collections.

So, while you might think you saved $65 on a parking ticket, you could be paying hundreds of dollars more on a new loan. That's because you might not get favorable terms on said loan because of the decrease in your credit score for not paying that parking ticket.

This goes the same for utility bills, back rent and other expenses that you forgot to pay. Make sure that all of your accounts are paid up so that no one can send your accounts to a collection agency.

This blog post originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

Jonathan Roisman

What Do the Words You Use Say About You?

How much does your vocabulary determine your success?

A lot.

Your personality can be determined just by looking at the way you text message. You can make accurate judgments about your favorite author’s personality just by reading their work. You can probably tell a great deal about my personality from the words I use in my blog posts.

…obscenity at the beginning or end of the speech significantly increased the persuasiveness of the speech and the perceived intensity of the speaker. Obscenity had no effect on speaker credibility.Word choice can predict whether you’redepressed, suicidal or lying. Swearing makes you more persuasive. It’s true, asshole:

Word choice changes when you’re lying:

An analysis of 242 transcripts revealed that liars produced more words, more sense-based words (e.g., seeing, touching), and used fewer self-oriented but more other-oriented pronouns when lying than when telling the truth. In addition, motivated liars avoided causal terms when lying, whereas unmotivated liars tended to increase their use of negations.

Things that are easy for our brain to process feel more true than concepts that are difficult to process. This is one of the reasons we tend to like the familiar more than the unfamiliar. It’s also why we may fall for the glib and specious versus more accurate but challenging explanations.

It’s also why small words are more effective than big ones and whytrying to sound smart actually makes you seem stupid.

Words affect our decision making. When crime is described as a “beast” people favor police and jails, when it’s a “virus” the public supports social reform.

But can words really predict behavior?

Boxers who spoke positively and referenced health and work before a match were more likely to win. Those who spoke tentatively and talked about social factors lost.

Speaking positively and using words related to “insight” is associated with outstanding achievement.

The way employees gossip about a company can predict its success or failure.

Via The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us:

And be very concerned if an organization’s employees start calling it “the company” or, worse, “that company” and referring to their co-workers as “they.” They-companies can be nightmares because workers are proclaiming that their work identity has nothing to do with them. No wonder consultants report that they-companies have unhappy workers and high turnover.

Which CEO’s are going to run a company into the ground? Count the number of times they use the word “I” in their annual letter to shareholders.

Via Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else:

Laura Rittenhouse, an unusual type of financial analyst, counts the number of times the word “I” occurs in annual letters to shareholders from corporate CEOs, contending that this and other evidence in the letters helps predict company performance (basic finding: Egomaniacs are bad news).

That word “I” can be very telling. Powerful people don’t say it much. Less powerful people say it the most. People use “I” rarely when lying in order to psychologically distance themselves.

By the same token, “we” can be extremely powerful. Just saying it can make people feel more positive toward you and create a feeling of familiarity.

Couples who say “we” often when describing their relationships are more satisfied. Use of the word “you” is a bad sign. Using “we” can even predict whether you’ll survive a heart attack.

From The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us:

A couple’s use of we-words when talking to a third party predicts a satisfying relationship…

In the laboratory, when talking about marital disagreements, we-words indicated a good relationship whereas the use of you-words suggested problems. The use of you-words, such as you, your, and yourself, were most apparent in toxic conversations—usually where the two participants were accusing each other of various shortcomings.

We-words may even save your life. In one project, patients with heart failure were interviewed with their spouses. They were asked a series of questions, including “As you think back on how the two of you have coped with the heart condition, what do you think you have done best?” The more the spouses used we-words in their answers, the healthier the patients were six months later.

Mimicking another person’s word choice improves negotiations.

In fact, similarity in word choice can predict who will fall in love. Examining the words of speed daters was more effective at predicting who would get together than watching them interact.

Words aren’t everything though

Your body language may be eight times as influential as your words.

Via The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive:

Language is an odd thing. We hear communication experts telling us time and again about things like the “7-38-55 rule,” first posited in 1971 by UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian: 55 percent of what you convey when you speak comes from your body language, 38 percent from your tone of voice, and a paltry 7 percent from the words you choose.

(More on body language here.)

And in case you were curious: just like you get words stuck on the tip of your tongue, deaf signers get words stuck on the tips of their fingers:

The “tip of the fingers” phenomenon (TOF) for sign language parallels the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon (TOT) for spoken language. During a TOF, signers are sure they know a sign but cannot retrieve it.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Eric Barker

Want Your Kid to Be Successful? Shark Tank's Barbara Corcoran Says You Should Do This.

Back off, helicopter parents. If you want your kid to grow up to be a successful entrepreneur -- or to realize her career dreams at all, whatever they are -- the best thing you can do is “take the pressure off,”Shark Tank star Barbara Corcoran says.

“Ignore what they don’t do well,” the millionaire mom of two recently told Entrepreneur.com on the Shark Tank set. “Instead, stay totally focused on finding what your kid does well and let them do a lot of it. They’ll be better and happier for it.”

And, while you’re at it, smothering Moms and Dads, stop nagging your child to get good grades already. Corcoran, who has dyslexia and admits that she was a “lousy,” straight-D student all through high school and college, made a point of never hounding her son Tom about scoring high marks. He’s now in his third year at Columbia University and faring quite well.

“I told him, ‘You don’t have to be a good student. Take your time. What the hell? Try this. Try that. Move around.’” The result? “A well-rounded creative kid that’s always going to be himself.”

To help your child learn, grow and come into their own with confidence, let her “experiment, make mistakes and recover, and don’t narrowly confine them the way that school systems and society does.” In other words, let your little one fall so she can learn how to pick herself up.   

The diner waitress turned wildly successful serial entrepreneur also said her “top four [Shark Tank] entrepreneurs” were all “lousy in school, too.” Being the “dunce and the out-man” prepares kids for the challenges of business, she said, because it teaches them first-hand how to cope with and bounce back from rejection.

“When you’re not good at school, you’re comfortable out there on the skirts,” she said. “You’re used to it. It’s like breathing. You get good at rejection and you don’t feel sorry for yourself when something goes wrong.”

Entrepreneurs who didn’t endure academic challenges, who had high-pressure parents and high grades to please them, are often more likely to “fold and feel bad for themselves,” she said. “While they’re busy feeling sorry for themselves, the world is going by.”

 Kim Lachance Shandrow