wrote:
My mortgage broker said last night that my TU mortgage (mid mortage score) was 1 point lower than needed to qualify for his mortgage program (others are not available for a low down payment due to a bankruptcy - have looked around a lot).
I am at 729. He said that 730 was a hard-line minimum. I pulled today's 3B report to look at trans union. All my credit cards as of Jan 30th, which is when I was told that the credit card companies report (once a month), were at 0 except for one that had less than 5%. Now there is more on them, but I can pay them off except a small balance on one today.
That's a great idea. The FICO mortgage models seem to really like it when you have exactly one credit card reporting a small positive balance and at least two others reporting $0. How many credit cards total do you have today? When your lender last generated your scores, how many cards were on the reports and how many showed a positive balance?
The one card that that reports the positive balance should be:
* A card in your name (not an AU card)
* A true credit card (not a charge card)
* A card with a balance of $5-15
* A card with a credit limit of < 29k
Also ideal is to keep your "positive" card the same one each month while you are trying to prepare for this mortgage.
That on the advice of the gurus on this forum. FICO says that I have 5 credit reporting payments and that 6 is better.
I am not sure what this means. Do you mean five open accounts? Five is actually fine and opening a sixth would not help you and might hurt you.
FICO also said that I had too much balance on an installment loan. I only have one, an Alliant one for 1K that now owes around $300. I pay $35 month. I don't want to pay it all off because the forum said my rating would go down immediately.
Nobody knows exactly how much help you get on mortgage scores from paying down loans. The good news is that it cannot hurt. Even better is the news that your lender, Alliant, will let you pay the loan down to a small balance and keep it open for the full term of the loan. Since the original loan amount was $1000, the amount you want to pay it down to is $85. Then log on to Alliant and you should see that your next due date for your monthly loan payment has been pushed back several months. If you have an automatic monthly payment set up, call Alliant and ask them if the rep can help you delete the auto pay. That way you can be sure that the loan balance won't go down to zero.
Could you give me your insights/experiences on trying to get this blessed point, and quickly if possible?
Get all cards reporting zero except one (AZEO) and pay the Alliant loan down and you should get at least a couple points. (Caveat: it sounds like your cards may have already been at All Zero Except One. Therefore while you want to make sure they stay at AZEO, you won't get any extra points for that. Perhaps the only help might be with the loan paydown and the weird thing is that it won't necessarily help all three scores.)
Do you have any derogs on any accounts? Late payments for example? Collections?
1) Should I pay the Alliant down to may 150 dollars, which is less than 6 months payment? If that would help, would the difference be seen immediately/1 day, or would I have to wait a month?
Alliant reports its loans to the credit bureaus on the last day of the month. Then it can take 5-8 more business days after that before the balance appears on all three bureaus. So my guess is you'd see the change around Fri March 9 but possibly as late as Tues March 13.
2) To get to 6 versus 5 credit reporting payments, would it help to get a second Alliant loan, or a Wells Fargo secured credit card for $500?
If so, would I get dinged for either them running a credit report or taking out a new loan for the next few months?
Opening new accounts strikes me as a bad idea. We'll know better if you tell us how many cards you have now.
Anything else that you can think of...thanks!
