Fico 04 scores

[BoredExcited]

We are trying to buy a house and we are using my wife's credit because mine is being rebuilt. Her scores are 

768 experian 

768 equifax

744 transunion 

nothing negative at all

Scores were checked on transunion's website and not credit karma or anything like that.

We thought we were good because of this. We never checked her fico 04 score which is 704. They said we were carrying to much credit card debt although the utilization is fine. How can we quickly get this score up to 740. The catch being we can't dump a bunch of cash into the cards because we need that for down payment and misc costs.

Any advice appreciated....

[CH-7-Mission-Accomplished]

You need to list all your accounts with balances and tell us the balance, the creditor and the credit limit.

Also do you have other installment debt?

[StartingOver10]

S ounds like a DTI issue. What is her gross income and what is her debt? Are you in a community property state?

[BoredExcited]

2 car payments

Citibank 2600 owed out of 12500

citibank 1600 owed out of 13500

Citibank 2500 owed out of 11500

chase 4800 owed out of 20000

chase 3500 owed out of 8500

Amex 2200 owed out of 7700

Discover 0 owed out of 5000

nordstrom 0 owed out of 10000

[CH-7-Mission-Accomplished]

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@BoredExcited wrote:

2 car payments

Citibank 2600 owed out of 12500

citibank 1600 owed out of 13500

Citibank 2500 owed out of 11500

chase 4800 owed out of 20000

chase 3500 owed out of 8500

Amex 2200 owed out of 7700

Discover 0 owed out of 5000

nordstrom 0 owed out of 10000

---

So it looks like you owe $16,200 in credit cards.  Not good but horrible.

Are you being told that you need a higher credit score or that you have too much in monthly debt paymnets for your income to qualify?

You said you got your regular scores from the Transunion site.  Those are FAKO scores no better than Credit Karma or the other FAKO sites.

You know you have a 704 FICO 04 on Transunion, which is good since you can't get that FICO 04 on this website.  But you CAN get your Experian FCO 04 and your Equifax FICO 04 from MyFICO.

You should order your FICO credit report with score for Experian and Equifax on this website.  It's about $20 per report.  They will show you the FICO 08 scores which are used for credit cards and also your FICO 04 mortgage scores for those two CRA's.

Your lender will use your middle FICO score so you need to know at least two of the scores and ideally three.

One thing you can do to raise your scores would be to consolidate those balances among fewer cards.  FICO prefers to see only one or two cards with a balance.  So if you can consolidate those Citibank balancses onto one card (with the highest credit limit) and the Chase balances onto one card (with the highest limit), and then payoff that AMEX card, you should see a jump in scores.  You would only have balances on 2 of 6 cards.

Please clarify if the problem is with the FICO score or debt payments amount.

Using a 2% payment estimate for revolving payments they would estimate your revolving payments at about $320/month.  What are your installment payments?  What is your provable gross monthly income being used?   What is the new proposed payment (principal, interest, taxes, insurance and HOA dues if a condo)?

Knowing your three FICO 04 scores so we can see the middle one, your gross monthly income, your proposed housing payment and your total debt we can see the total picture.

[Lemmus]

...without knowing your wife's gross income its difficult to say what is a bad credit card load although you're certainly carrying much more than is recommended for the best scoring ...if the 704 TU score is an actual FICO 04 score, its certainly not blocking you from getting a mortgage though you may not get the best rates ...but its somewhat strange for you to cite only the TU score, your lender will normally pull all 3 and use the mid-score ...the LO should certainly be able to give you that info.

...the problem may lie with your DTIR where each of those CCs is adding to your monthly debt payments and making it too high to qualify ...this is where a decent LO can make a huge difference ...a good one would tell you exactly what the problem(s) is/are and recommend how best to fix it ...not give you vague answers that really don't tell you or us what we need to know to best answer your questions.

...suggest you read the pinned thread on this forum re exactly what info is needed to give you the best results to your mortgage questions ...then post all that info here ...the more info you post the better responses you will get ...hth

[mmmlive1999]

Easiest option is to pull the other 2 lender scores Equifax and Experian here from myfico and see if they are both over 740,if so, it does not matter what the Transunion score is because one of those will be the middle score!!! You may not need to move any money at all

Just knowing the one TU score does not give you enough information to make a sound financial decision.

Good luck

[madmann26]

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@BoredExcited wrote:

2 car payments

Citibank 2600 owed out of 12500

citibank 1600 owed out of 13500

Citibank 2500 owed out of 11500

chase 4800 owed out of 20000

chase 3500 owed out of 8500

Amex 2200 owed out of 7700

Discover 0 owed out of 5000

nordstrom 0 owed out of 10000

---

That's 18% utilization.

Also, most of your cards have balances. That's probably raising a few eyebrows.