Getting to 750 - advice?

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone. I'm very happy to have found these forums with you knowledgeable and kind people. I am trying to get my credit score from the current 703 up to 750+ over about the next 7 months. Here are some details of current credit status:
I have two credit cards, a Chase United Miles Visa with a credit limit of 12,600 and current balance of approx. 7,000; and a DiscoverCard with a credit limit of $7,600 and current balance of approx. $3,000. Both of them charge very high interest rates.
I have a student loan with a balance of about $16,000; monthly payments just under $300.
I have a car loan with a balance of about $9,000, monthly payments approx. $275.
All of my accounts are shown in "pays as agreed" status. The only late payments that show up are two 30-day lates on the Chase card. One is from about 18 months ago and the other from about 2 years ago.
I have no other derogatory information such as bankruptcy, default, judgment, etc.
I just found out that Chase is not reporting my available credit to the credit bureaus. I am not sure whether this is a mistake on their part, or if they are on of those companies that does not report this as a matter of policy. I have started an inquiry with Chase to figure out whether it is a mistake. Obviously, not having any record of having a credit limit of $12K+ is damaging my FICO score, so I either need to get Chase to fix it (if it is an error), or possibly open another credit card account and transfer my Chase balance, and perhaps the DiscoverCard balance, to that card.
First, with my current credit status and score, how likely is it that I can qualify for a zero-interest balance transfer card? I don't want to apply and get rejected, that would just damage my score more.
Also, if I get a new card with zero balance transfer rates, I can pay down my current balances much faster. I am working on a plan to get them (collectively) below 25% of available credit by late next spring, when I will be shopping for a mortgage.
Other than getting a zero balance card which will report available balance, is there anything (legitimate) I can do to improve my FICO score over the next several months?

[sl]

Looks like your utilization is a bit high.  I would try to get your utilization down.

[Anonymous]

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Bufflehead wrote:
Hello everyone. I'm very happy to have found these forums with you knowledgeable and kind people. I am trying to get my credit score from the current 703 up to 750+ over about the next 7 months. Here are some details of current credit status:
I have two credit cards, a Chase United Miles Visa with a credit limit of 12,600 and current balance of approx. 7,000; and a DiscoverCard with a credit limit of $7,600 and current balance of approx. $3,000. Both of them charge very high interest rates.
I have a student loan with a balance of about $16,000; monthly payments just under $300.
I have a car loan with a balance of about $9,000, monthly payments approx. $275.
All of my accounts are shown in "pays as agreed" status. The only late payments that show up are two 30-day lates on the Chase card. One is from about 18 months ago and the other from about 2 years ago.
I have no other derogatory information such as bankruptcy, default, judgment, etc.
I just found out that Chase is not reporting my available credit to the credit bureaus. I am not sure whether this is a mistake on their part, or if they are on of those companies that does not report this as a matter of policy. I have started an inquiry with Chase to figure out whether it is a mistake. Obviously, not having any record of having a credit limit of $12K+ is damaging my FICO score, so I either need to get Chase to fix it (if it is an error), or possibly open another credit card account and transfer my Chase balance, and perhaps the DiscoverCard balance, to that card.
First, with my current credit status and score, how likely is it that I can qualify for a zero-interest balance transfer card? I don't want to apply and get rejected, that would just damage my score more.
Also, if I get a new card with zero balance transfer rates, I can pay down my current balances much faster. I am working on a plan to get them (collectively) below 25% of available credit by late next spring, when I will be shopping for a mortgage.
Other than getting a zero balance card which will report available balance, is there anything (legitimate) I can do to improve my FICO score over the next several months?

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Send a gw letter for the lates.  If they honor it you could possibly see 10-30 pts added when the lates are removed otherwise the quickest and easy way would be to pay a big chunk of your cc debt down

[Anonymous]

Pay everything on time and the 18mo old late will be over 2 years old in 6 months and not hurting your score as much. You can also try to get both lates removed using a GW as mentioned earlier. It looks like you have almost 50% utilization (you only listed 2 cards and their limits). If you can get this under 25% you should see a nice gain and between 1-9% will net you the max amount of points. If the Chase card is not reporting a limit, you could open an account that does and do a BT and get the added bonus of 0% or some other low APR. This should be enough to let you get over 720 no problem but I don't know enough to say that it will be over 750.