Care about your credit score? Get strategic with card limits

By AMANDA BARROSO of NerdWallet

If you want to build your credit score, knowing your credit card limits and managing how you use them can help. A major factor in credit scores is credit utilization, which is simply how much of your credit limits you are using at a given moment. To know how you’re doing on credit utilization, you need to know your credit limits. Then, aim to have less than 30% of any card’s credit limit in use; lower is better for your score. Setting balance alerts and making smaller payments before your balance is due can help keep your utilization low.