Credit Scoring Expert speaks candidly about his personal growth and asks respected writers to share content to help others improve their life.

This week’s post is a little outside the topic of credit, but it definitely falls within my expertise as a lender. The issue is this: How does a person manage his or her mortgage payment if a lender closes or files for bankruptcy? In utopia, you’d be off scott-free, right? Not so lucky. Just keep making your payments as usual until you receive instructions to direct your payment elsewhere. If your lender files for bankruptcy after the loan closes, your loan and the rights to service them might be bought by another mortgage “servicer.” If your loan has been transferred, you will be given two notices: One from your current servicer—the company to whom you have been making payments—and another from the new servicer. Be sure this isn’t a scam and call both your current servicer and the new servicer to make sure the transfer is legitimate. Which brings me to the topic of your credit score: Always double and triple check before sending a payment to an unknown lender, or before giving your account information to someone. Identity theft can trash a person’s credit score, and in today’s age of technology, it is becoming more and more common. Prudence is especially important when responding to emails. Some crooks disguise their email addresses and links to web addresses, making it look as though they are representatives of a legitimate creditor. When paying a bill online, or when updating account information, never click on links within emails. Instead, type the company’s legitimate URL within your browser.

I regularly counsel people against letting their credit cards go inactive, but the repercussions of inactive credit cards can be a little bit of a mystery. Here are a couple of the reasons against it: First of all, the account may eventually drop off your credit report. Though this wouldn’t happen immediately, after seven to 10 years of inactivity, it simply won’t be included in the formula for determining your credit score. And some credit card companies might choose to stop reporting your inactive account even sooner, meaning it might drop from your credit report within a year or two of inactivity. Regardless, the length of time you have had credit comprises a big chunk of your score, so having it drop from your report will likely hurt your score. But the more important reason is that an inactive account can mess with your utilization rate (the account you carry in proportion to your limit). Let’s say, for instance, that you have a credit card with a $10,000 limit and a $3,000 balance. You have a 30 percent balance, the most you can have to tilt the scoring formula in your favor. Then you stop using the card, but you pay only the minimum required. Your credit card’s policy might be to drop your limit after a period of inactivity, so it reduces your limit to $5,000. Your balance, however, has only been reduced to $2,800. Now your utilization rate is 56 percent, which isn’t good from a credit-scoring perspective. The good news is that the solution is relatively simple. So long as your credit score hasn’t dropped since you opened the card, you can likely call and get the card reactivated. Be sure to specify that you want to reactive the account, not open a new one. That said, you might not receive the same limit you once had, so it is best to never let a credit card go inactive. Nowadays, this is easier than ever. You can create an automatic “bill pay” using the credit card to pay a regular bill (such as cable), and then create another automatic “bill pay” from your checking account to pay the credit card bill, which means you won’t pay interest, but will keep all credit cards active.

He may be the richest person in the world, but Warren Buffet’s credit score won’t get him the best interest rates. According to Fortune, when Buffet pulled his credit report recently, he learned his score is 718, two points lower than the cutoff for the best interest rates.

To be clear, 718 is a good score, but it isn’t great. On a $300,000 home loan, the difference between a 718 credit score and a 720 credit score could be as much as $8,640. Buffet will probably survive—he’s worth $62 billion dollars—but he serves a good lesson: salary and net worth have nothing to do with a credit score.

Your credit score is a sign of your financial reputation. Regardless of whether you make $10,000 a year or $1 million a year, your credit score will determine the interest you pay on your home loan, car loan, or credit card. In fact, I recently processed two loans at the same time: one was for a CEO, the other for her assistant. The CEO’s assistant, who made one-tenth of his boss’s salary, had a much higher credit score than his millionaire boss.

The article goes on to say Buffet’s subpar score is a result of identity theft. Even someone as famous, protected, and well advised as Buffet can become a victim of fraud, yet another reason to regularly pull and monitor your credit report.