Accelerating short sale recovery

Anonymous · ‎11-13-2015

First post! So I'll dive right in to my question:

I had a short sale one year ago, closed 11/6/2014. That shows up as 9 months of non-payment, account paid in full for less than full balance.

I don't know what my FICO scores are. I just opened a Discover card that comes with a score so I will know in a bit. Otherwise I just use Credit Karma and Credit Sesame which have me in the 640s.

I bought a used car in May at 13.5% for 72mos. Getting out of the truck I was in was top priority so I took the loan with the plan of refinancing as soon as my credit allows.

Over the past 6mos I've opened 5 new cards (all except Mazuma and Care Credit listed in my sig). I know that's hit my AAoA but it's greatly improved my utilization. I'm using them for my regular transactions and allowing them to post a balance which I'm always paying in full.

My thinking is my working with the cards as I've been doing will help accelerate my recovery from the short sale so I can refinance my car loan into much better terms.

Does this sound like I'm on the right track? Have I gone overboard on the cards? Anything else I can do? Or should I just 'garden' now?

Thanks!

Anonymous · ‎11-14-2015

@Anonymous wrote:
First post! So I'll dive right in to my question:

I had a short sale one year ago, closed 11/6/2014. That shows up as 9 months of non-payment, account paid in full for less than full balance.

I don't know what my FICO scores are. I just opened a Discover card that comes with a score so I will know in a bit. Otherwise I just use Credit Karma and Credit Sesame which have me in the 640s.

I bought a used car in May at 13.5% for 72mos. Getting out of the truck I was in was top priority so I took the loan with the plan of refinancing as soon as my credit allows.

Over the past 6mos I've opened 5 new cards (all except Mazuma and Care Credit listed in my sig). I know that's hit my AAoA but it's greatly improved my utilization. I'm using them for my regular transactions and allowing them to post a balance which I'm always paying in full.

My thinking is my working with the cards as I've been doing will help accelerate my recovery from the short sale so I can refinance my car loan into much better terms.

Does this sound like I'm on the right track? Have I gone overboard on the cards? Anything else I can do? Or should I just 'garden' now?

Thanks!

You have plenty of cards - now get in the garden. For optimum scoring only let ONE card report a balance, pay all the others in full before the statement closes. You seem to be doing fine from what I can see.

Anonymous · ‎11-14-2015

Ah, ok. Weird. I wonder why that is. I've read that the grace period is more of a relic. Maybe that's why.

The house I sold was an urban farm, so I guess I'm back in the garden!

StartingOver10 · ‎11-14-2015

@Anonymous wrote:
Ah, ok. Weird. I wonder why that is. I've read that the grace period is more of a relic. Maybe that's why.

The house I sold was an urban farm, so I guess I'm back in the garden!

No, what was meant by the prior post has nothing to do with the grace period. What he is saying is to optimize your score you need to have all the credit cards report zero balance except for one card. Have that one card report a balance between 1% to 9% of it's individual credit limit. Why? Because your score will then increase substantially from whatever you have now (the scores you listed are not FICO and have no relationship to FICO)

Note, you can use your cards as much as you want during the month as long as they are paid prior to zero prior to the statement generating.

If you aren't going to apply for new credit, then you don't need to optimize your score each month.

Anonymous · ‎11-14-2015

I know CK and CS are not FICO. And I'm just pondering the scoring model - why it cares about a balance posting even when PIF.