If you are lucky, you are reading this as one of thousands of Americans who has a stable “good” score on their credit ranking. Lately, you may have heard one of dozens of freecreditreport.com commercials advertising how important credit can be, and it is true. While the commercials may be exaggerated, once you get yourself on the credit repair path it can be hard to get back off. So make sure that you stay on the top of your game to avoid finding yourself in a tough predicament.

There are many helpful practices you can employ in your daily life to keep yourself off the credit repair path, and most of them are common sense, and they are that way for a reason. If you listened to our instincts more instead of impishly hoping maybe you will get a break, then we would probably all have excellent credit scores.

As this is not the case, there are some guidelines that you can follow in your day to day life to keep you off the credit repair path and keep you sitting comfortably at good, or maybe even slide you up to that excellent score, depending on how well you heed the tips and warnings.

First off, if you don't want to start credit repair techniques, you need to monitor your credit on at least a semi-regular basis. Identity theft can happen to good people, and unfortunately even too very careful people. Make sure that your name and soc is not out there being used by anybody but you. If you have any doubts, get to the bottom of them immediately before you watch your score drop, because even if you can catch the thief, you will still be the one stuck repairing the credit.

Regular on time bill payments on the top area that cannot be stressed enough. Two very large areas of how your credit score is calculated (50%!) are dependent on how responsible with your bills, your payment history and credit history. If you don't want to find yourself traveling in the credit repair land, you NEED to make all of your payments on time, and on time does not mean a week later. Don't count on grace period, because not all companies have one, which may be why you are sitting at good and not excellent.

Having an extreme amount of debt is the second thing that can be drifting you towards the boundary line of safe and credit repair. Making up a solid 30% of your score, you need to make sure that the debt you have is limited in relation to how much you could have based on what lenders would give you and your equity. Any time you have debts, you should be concentrated most of your efforts on them, instead of finding new ways to finance a purchase. This one is a double edged sword.

There are people who live their whole lives and never have to worry about credit repair. If you can follow these guidelines and continue to keep all your payments healthy and your debt down, you are well on track to being one of them.