Another thing is to be very careful about anything that could cause an inquiry. When I bought my car for cash, they wanted to do a credit check before I drove off with the car in case my personal check bounced. I talked them into taking a printout of a free credit report from annualcreditreport.com, plus a printout of my bank balance, and thereby avoided an inquiry.
I also decided not to sign up for a landline phone, even though I wanted one, because AT&T said they might check my credit.
