Bad Credit....Decent Income

[Anonymous]

I was on my way to rebuilding my credit when my husband got laid off. He is back working now. Our credit is around 548 for both. I have a credit card that just charged off balance $1,474 and another card that has balance of about $1,200 which was 90 days past due. I can pay both of these off in 2 weeks. Have a collections from 2013 for $470. Student loans up to date. He has an old collection for about $2200 from like 5 years ago. Do you think we have a chance of buying in a couple of months if I pay off past balances. Our combined income is $115,000. Maybe through Carrington? Thanks for your help!

[Revelate]

Paying off the CO will help revolving utilization and get the line drawn in the sand there.

Getting current on the 90D late you should do as well as but that won't improve your score much unless it makes a meaningful difference to your revolving utilization.

The collections: post them over in Rebuilding and see if you can get them off your reports altogether via a pay for delete (PFD) or other technique as paying them won't help at all, but if you can get them off it's a huge win credit wise especially if those are your only public records (collections basically count similarly as tax liens and judgements) on your report. 

Not familiar with Carrington but I haven't been paying much attention to the mortgage market (or forums, my bad) as of late; I think you need to get to around 580 for FHA still though, which is a big maybe... but right now just stop the bleeding is the first step.