I have recently been advised by two of my three credit card companies that my APR is to be increased - MINT up to approx 24 per cent and now Alliance & Leicester to 34 per cent.

Both cards are utilising up to close to their maximum at around £10,000 and I make monthly payments of about £300 on each. I have been about five days late in making a payment to MINT in April but otherwise normally pay be the due date.

I have one other credit card with Morgan Stanley with a lower balance of £4000 and make similar payments.

In addition I have two personal loans with Egg initially at £18,000 each started nearly 4 years ago and with a further three years to run - this has never been more than a few days behind on payments, and never in the last 12 months as far as I am aware.

I have one other personal loan with Northern Rock taken out a year ago for £20,000 running for 10 years and paid on time as above.

My husband and I were looking for a mortgage last year and so made sure all was well with our credit score. Mine was around 970 after some discrepancies had been sorted out and my husband's was over 700 again with some further sorting out which needed to be carried out.

I checked my credit rating this week and felt extremely anxious when I saw it had dropped to 312 - there seems nothing obvious on the report, other than obviously quite a large amount of credit but this is not significantly different from last year and I have continued to make payments on time.

Please can you advise if credit scoring mechanism has changed. If I am paying such enormous interest rates I am afraid I will never clear these balances but the credit card companies will not reduce my rates on account of my credit score.

Jennifer Allen

Rising living costs and concerns about customers defaulting on their payments mean that many lenders are now monitoring their customers' credit reports very closely and are taking mitigating action, such as reducing credit limits or raising interest rates, where they believe someone's financial situation is deteriorating.

Your personal experience sounds like a very good example of this. You appear to have a lot of outstanding unsecured debt, perhaps in excess of £60k, and although I don’t know anything about your income and expenditure, this level of unsecured credit is likely to make most lenders a little nervy in the current climate.

Some of your debts, particularly the credit cards, sound very expensive and you should really take a long, hard look at these to see if you can save yourself some money and perhaps simplify your borrowing.

As well as checking your Experian Credit Score, which is a good guide to how a lender might assess your current creditworthiness, now is a very good time to actually use your credit report to review your credit history and all of your credit commitments to see if you can improve your situation. You might also consider getting some independent financial advice.

Of course, the odd late payment on your credit report is not going to do you any favours so you need to set up direct debits to make at least the minimum payments on time each month. You can always top these payments up if and when you can afford to. If at any stage you feel you are losing control of the situation, don’t panic. Simply contact a free debt counsellor at Citizens Advice, the Consumer Credit Counselling Service or National Debtline for expert help and advice.