Getting good credit can seem like something of a mystery if you don’t understand what exactly affects your credit score. To many people, a credit score seems like an almost mystically arrived at number, with little bearing to the real world. Because the credit score companies are rarely as transparent as they could be, discerning how exactly they determine who has good credit and who has bad credit can be something of a mystery. Thankfully, because of the amount of energy poured into understanding credit scores over the past few years, there are some well agreed upon steps almost anyone can take to get better credit.

First of all, it’s important to understand what a credit score is. Credit scores are just ratings of a person’s credit, based on a wide range of criteria, from how much debt they are carrying, to past delinquencies, to the length of time they’ve had lines of credit. The most common credit scoring system in the United States if the Fair Isaac Corporation score, or FICO score, but there are a number of other scoring system, including VantageScore, the CE Score, and NextGen. Because FICO is so common, however, when most people talk about getting good credit, they mean improving their FICO score.

The FICO score is based on a complex rubric of calculations, which are all quite secret. The Fair Isaac Corporation, however, has given a basic breakdown of what different factors impact it, and how much they are roughly weighted. In order from most-important to least, these are: on-time payments (35% of score), ratio of debt to credit (30%), length of credit lines (15%), makeup of credit types (10%), and recent credit queries (10%). Some of these are easier to change than others, but all can be modified over time to improve your score and get you good credit.

The single most important component of good credit is simply making payments on time. A delinquent payment is any payment more than thirty days past due, and even a single late payment can drastically impact your credit score negatively. Few people realize just how important it is to pay credit bills on time each and every pay cycle. Even once the damage has been done, however, you can repair it over time by continuing to pay bills on time after missing them once or twice. After just six months the majority of the damage will have been repaired.

Next in importance is the ratio of rotating debt to rotating credit held. This is basically how much money you owe, in relation to how much money the credit card companies have extended to you in credit lines. So, someone who owes $1,000 US Dollars (USD) and has a $20,000 USD credit line would likely be fine, whereas someone with $1,000 USD owed and only $1,200 USD in debt would have much worse credit. Paying down credit card debts is therefore an important part of building good credit.

The length of time you have had credit is also an important factor in getting good credit. This, of course, is something that only time can fix, and is often one of the most vexing aspects of building good credit for younger consumers who haven’t had time to build a long credit history. Thankfully, at only a 15% weight, it is easily mitigated by handling other aspects of the score well. The types of debt held are also important, with things low-quality debt like consumer finance being much more detrimental to the credit score than things like simple revolving debt. Lastly, every time a credit company queries the credit unions for a credit score, indicating that you want a new line of credit, or a change to your existing line, your credit score is negatively impacted.

So, to get good credit you would want to make every payment on time, keep your held debt low and your total credit high, start with credit as early as you can and continue using it throughout your life, hold as much as your debt in solid installment credit rather than revolving credit card debt, and have as few credit queries as you possibly can be made in your name. Following these simple steps can help you get nearly perfect credit. Over time, and with a bit of diligence, even quite poor credit can be made good without too much work.