While taking up a small amount of credit and paying it back on time is helpful for improving your score if you've not had credit before, as a general rule you should not use credit to pay for something unless you absolutely need to.

Each time you apply for credit, a hard inquiry is made into your credit worthiness and of itself this negatively impacts your credit score. So one way to keep your score higher is to limit these hard inquiries. Besides, if you can afford to pay for something outright, you'll avoid having to pay out extra in the longer term in interest payments.

When you already have a mortgage in place, there are various reasons why you might want to renew your mortgage or change providers. This is called getting a remortgage. You might have come to the end of a fixed interest term period, for example, and be seeking a new fixed interest term rather than going on to your lender's standard variable rate, or you might want to get a lump sum to carry out a loft conversion.

To find out more, click on Remortgages