Credit Score Hell

If you are wondering about the past couple of titles, it's October and close to Halloween. Money Central has an excellent article called "Weird stuff that hurts your credit", as if I did not have enough to worry about rebuilding my credit and paying off our credit card debt. One of the things that I didn't know about is that Capital One and American Express do not share you credit limit with the credit agencies and this can hurt your score. I have a couple of Capital One cards, but I have maxed them out a couple times so my credit report shows my highest limits on each card. Another thing that I didn't know is that the credit agencies have different scoring groups or score cards. Depending on where you fall, you credit activities can move you up or down to a better or worse scoring group. As if I didn't have enough worries about jacking up my credit. Transfering all of your credit debt onto one low interest card can also hurt your credit score. It seems that they would rather you have lots of cards with lower amounts owed on each. Settling debts with companies you owe is also bad for your credit score. It seem's that waiting for it to go into collections is better for you (this makes no sense to me). Here is my favorite one, unpaid traffic or parking fines, and old library fines will be reported and effect your credit score. Nice huh? So return all those old library books and pay your fines. Be happy that they aren't reporting late video fees yet or I would be in some serious trouble.