Quick boost of FICO

[Anonymous]

As many on this board- my FICO was ruined by Verizon. It hasn't bothered me for years until.... 

I am about to buy a house and lender quoted a cost of "FICO adjuster" which is ~1% of house price. My FICO last time checked was ~650, is it realistic to expect it boosts to 720 in 2 months? If yes, how shall I do it?

Any suggestion is appreciated!

[MarineVietVet]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

As many on this board- my FICO was ruined by Verizon. It hasn't bothered me for years until.... 

I am about to buy a house and lender quoted a cost of "FICO adjuster" which is ~1% of house price. My FICO last time checked was ~650, is it realistic to expect it boosts to 720 in 2 months? If yes, how shall I do it?

Any suggestion is appreciated!

---

Hello and welcome.

I hope someone is able to help you with this but it's terminology I am not familiar with.

From a BK years ago to:
EX - 3/11 pulled by lender- 835, EQ - 2/11-816, TU - 2/11-782

"Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they've made a difference. The Marines don't have that problem".

[GregB]

I think what is confusing this is the the OP referred to ~1% of the house price, when it is likely they meant 1% higher interest rate. I have seen some lenders quote their "interest rate", which is for a loan made with reasonable LTV and a person with top level credit. They then have an "adjustment chart", which shows the additional interest rate that is charged for lower FICO scores or higher LTV.

[Anonymous]

best way to boost quickly in my opinion revolves around your credit cards...do you have any credit cards?  what are their balances?  what are your limits?!

you could pay down some of your balance if you have any to under 9 %....that might give you a boost in some time...

or maybe, just maybe, somebody with more information will chime in here....if you dont have the money to pay down your credit card balances to under 9% then ask your credit cards to increase your limit?!  that worked for me....besides history and trade lines your ratios will count heavily....

if they do a hard pull and you have 2 credit cards with credit limits of  500 each then you have 1000 in available credit.  if your balancexs on those two cards is less then 90 bucks combined ( 9% is preferred) your utilization looks low which makes your fico increase?!  does that make sense?!?

[doublespaces]

Here is my recommendation.

Pay off all your credit cards except for one, and leave a very small balance on it. This alone could bump you up 50+ points depending on how much utilization you have on your credit cards. As the above poster mentioned, another trick if you don't have enough money to pay them down(and I would seriously recommend borrowing from family because this is an instant and huge score increase in many cases) then you could try to lower your cc  utilization by increasing your limits. This could work well or back fire on you FYI. If you request a CLI and it becomes a hard inquiry and you don't get the increase or the increase is so marginal that it doesn't offset the inquiry difference, then it hasn't worked but there are cases where it can.

Go purchase both of your scores here at myfico. It may be worth it to goto equfax and purchase their scorewatch service, I have it and love it. Updates you usually the next day when your Equifax FICO score changes.If you have little credit card debt, the TU score here may be conservative, if you have high CC debt/utilization it may be optimistic to the actual TU04 score that a lot of lenders are pulling today. I've personally found with 1 dollar credit card debt that my TU score here was 22 points lower than my TU04 score pulled by a lender the next day.

Regardleess, get an Idea of what your scores are. You will need to go to experian.com and pull your experian report and compare your experian reports to your other two and try to get an idea based on the negative accounts and inquiries that are listed on your reports. The more inquiries the lower the score, the more negative remarks, so on. Once you find out which score is most likely your lowest one, you can see if any of your existing credit cards pull that Credit reporting agency for CLI's. You can put an inquiry as much as you like, to a degree, if its your lowest score since lenders usually only take the middle score. Try to get a CLI on all your cards as long as they don't do a hard pull, which you may or may not be able to know how to do.

Another tip, do not dispute anything, and in fact make sure you have all your dispute comments removed at this point in the game as it may prevent you from passing through automatic underwriting.

You could also try sending goodwill letters to the CEO's of the companies that are listed on your accounts without triggering a dispute on your credit report but make sure not to get any of your old tradlines removed as that will screw up your average age of accounts.

Good luck!

PS. If the last time you checked your credit was a long time ago and you've paid all your bills and credt cards on time since then, it is likely your score is higher than 650 now through the natural process of paying in a timely fashion.