5 Credit Score Myths AI Fact-Checked So You Don't Have To

I spent 11 years building the decisioning systems banks use to approve or deny credit. So when my sister-in-law told me she was closing her oldest credit card to "clean up her file," I nearly spit out my coffee. Let's fix a few of these myths before they cost you real money.

Myth 1: Checking your own credit score hurts it

This one refuses to die. Here's the actual mechanic: there are two types of inquiries, soft and hard. When you check your own score through your bank app or a monitoring service, that's a soft inquiry. It never touches your FICO or VantageScore calculation. Hard inquiries only happen when a lender pulls your file because you applied for actual credit, a mortgage, a car loan, a new card.

The scoring models literally can't tell the difference between you checking your own score and, say, your mom checking it for you. They just don't count soft pulls. Check your score weekly if you want. It changes nothing.

Myth 2: Closing old, unused credit cards helps your score

This is the one that got my sister-in-law. The instinct makes sense on the surface, fewer cards feels tidier. But two things happen the moment you close that card:

• Your total available credit drops, which can spike your credit utilization ratio overnight
• Eventually, that account stops reporting and your average age of accounts starts shrinking

I've watched this play out in actual portfolio data. Utilization and length of credit history together make up over 45% of a typical FICO score. Closing a 12-year-old card with a $10,000 limit and zero balance is one of the fastest ways to tank a score for no reason. If the card has no annual fee, just let it sit there quietly earning you points.

Myth 3: Carrying a small balance boosts your score

I hear this constantly, usually from someone who read it on a forum in 2014. The theory goes that lenders want to see you "using" credit responsibly, so a little revolving balance proves it. It doesn't work that way.

Scoring models look at your balance at whatever moment your card issuer reports to the bureaus, usually your statement closing date. There's no bonus for carrying debt. Paying your statement in full every month, before or after the due date, gets you the best possible utilization number and costs you nothing in interest. The myth probably survives because people confuse "having a credit history" with "carrying a balance." You need the first one. You never need the second.

Myth 4: Income affects your credit score

This surprises people every time. Your salary, your job title, your net worth, none of it is in the FICO or VantageScore formula. The bureaus don't even reliably have that data. Scores are built entirely from your credit file: payment history, amounts owed, length of history, credit mix, and new credit.

Where income actually matters is on the lending side, separate from the score itself. A bank looks at your income and existing debt to calculate debt-to-income ratio when deciding how much to approve you for. That's a real underwriting factor. It just isn't baked into the three-digit number itself. You can have a 780 score on a modest income, or a 620 score with a six-figure salary if you've missed payments.

Myth 5: All credit scores are the same number everywhere

Nope. There isn't one master score. FICO alone has different versions, FICO 8, FICO 9, industry-specific versions for auto lenders and mortgage lenders. VantageScore is a completely separate model built by the three bureaus jointly, with its own scale and logic. Add in the fact that Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion don't always have identical data in your file, and you can legitimately have three or four different scores at the same moment, all technically correct.

This is exactly why the score your credit card app shows you might be 40 points off from what a mortgage lender pulls. Neither one is wrong. They're just different models looking at slightly different data.

The common thread here: your score reacts to real, mechanical inputs, not vibes or folk wisdom. If you want to stop guessing and actually watch how these factors move your number in real time, a good credit monitoring service will show you the utilization, inquiries, and account age changes as they happen, worth setting up once and forgetting about.