@Anonymous wrote:No worries. That does not include the payment to enhanced recovery. I would say we have about 1500 to spend on the CC debt.
Thanks
Am sorry it took so long; didn't take long to do up, just been working, sleeping, eating not enough and that's it besides some escrow paperwork.
Here's the money shot of the spreadsheet I did, results actually came in not so bad looking at it objectively, if you find more money you can do better but just did it off $1500. If you want the Excel sheet I did it in to play with numbers yourself I'll be glad to send it to you.
| AAOA less than 2 years regardless, balance optimization is all that matters | |||||||
| Remove Wife as AU from both of Jay's Cap One accounts | |||||||
| Remove Jay as AU from Wife's Cap One UNLESS you find more money to pay it down near to zero | |||||||
| 1500 | |||||||
| Pay: Jay Gas Card to Zero | 90 | 1410 | |||||
| Pay: Wife Amex to Zero | 953 | 457 | |||||
| Pay: Jay 1st C1 by 30 to 396 | 30 | 427 | |||||
| Pay: Jay 2nd C1 by 80 to 398 | 80 | 347 | |||||
| Pay: Wife C1 remaining | 347 | 0 | |||||
| Results: | |||||||
| Wife 1/5 cards reporting balance, any extra money kick to her Cap 1 card | |||||||
| Wife aggregate 27.3% revolving utilization | |||||||
| Jay all tradelines <80%, 4/9 reporting a balance | |||||||
| Jay aggregate 29.1% revolving util |
@Anonymous wrote:Will removing someone as an AU, remove that account from their report all together? just curious And yeah, i would love to have the spreadsheet.
For Cap 1 yes, not so certain about Amex as the AU is actually it's own tradeline.
That was the rationale for paying off the Amex and leaving it on both reports, rather than the Cap 1 cards. I'm on 9 cards as well, and I take drops at 3 cards and 5 cards with balance, so while your report is different and may behave differently, at best estimate I simply shot for the 4/9 including AU's which FICO 04 and 98 which mortgage uses absolutely will count.
I'll send you the worksheet when I get home, but optimization goal was 1/5 for wife, <50% cards with balances for you, and <30% util which is not a bad place to be. As stated with more money you can get prettier, but even with the limited resources you actually do a lot better than what I was thinking when reading this thread initially. Won't be perfect, but it'll be as good as it can get and actually as a short-term optimization with limited finances, that's not a crappy plan if I do say so myself haha.
More cash, keep paying down wife's utilization, but don't pay everything off to $0, leave a couple of bucks on that Cap 1 card; though if you do find the funds to get it down, then leaving yourself as an AU on that card would help your own utilization but I think it's likely your wife's score which will likely be the low one if I had to guess. Will definitely be interested in hearing your results!
@Anonymous wrote:I really appreciate your help. Here is a little update that may change a few things. It looks like we are going to give it about 3 months and then see if I can do the mortgage just on my on. I am pretty sure that I can with my income and bills. Our 1 car payment is just in her name. I only have about $400 in bills on my report each month. The reasoning is that she is really wanting to get off the night shift, and that would require taking a 1099 nursing position. So if she does that, then including her on the loan would mean having to wait 2 years. Plues, once she quits, we can take a little out of her retirement and use for the down payment. So that may make our plan a little different than we had anticipated. I really do appreciate all of your help on this.
Makes sense just do the DTI calculation beforehand.
If she has the other job lined up basically now, and cash flow isn't a problem, then you can optimize a little differently. I'd still take the PFD's since that's nothing but goodness for both you and her when you're talking after mortgage stuff, but the focus is going to be more on your credit instead.
Really at that point this gets very easy: prioritize your own debt first, make sure you have some small balance on one card by the time you go for application, and any debt on either your wife's Amex (first) or Cap 1 (second) for the reasons already mentioned above, just remove yourself from. You'd like to keep that Cap 1 if you can as it's longer than the rest of your tradelines, and I don't know how the Amex will report if you remove it but if you can't pay it and prefer to hoard for downpayment, can nuke it and see... I imagine the balance would go to zero anyway and it might come off, since it's so new, not really losing anything by it. Anyway it gives you a lot more options with the additional time, and if you don't need your wife's income to qualify, it's a good plan.
@Anonymous wrote:So should I keep myself on her Cap 1 and Am Exp if I know we can pay those balances down before I do the mortgage app?
If you can pay down your own balances sure! The Cap 1 is your oldest account between the two of you, and that's a good AU for you to have period; the Amex might stay on your report anyway and I'm guessing you may use that as a real AU rather than just as a credit building exercise (i.e. leverage it for rewards spending)... plus you don't have to do that right now if you have a 3 month delay.
End of the day if you're doing this on your own: you ideally want all accounts except for one of your own tradelines to be $0, and that includes your wife's accounts that you're AU on. That's the simple optimized goal, if you can do it, go for it, that plus a clean report, you likely hit 680 or perhaps even a tier or two higher best case scenario... you don't have that much in the way of history but if you're clean, you'll be good and when you're talking short history anyway, even 3 months might be beneficial credit wise too!
@Anonymous wrote:Thanks again. I will continue on this path. I got a 10 point bump today just from Lowes reporting a 0 balance. Buckle should report that too soon. I have faxed all of the PDF letters to the credit bureaus, so maybe they will start deleting off of my report soon. Do you need my email address to send that spreadsheet?
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