My wife and I are on a 9-12 month plan to start building a house. Our target Fico score is 660-680, my scores are sitting at 608-612
My credit score is the one we need to work on and I have a clean payment history for the last 4 years and my largest bad items are late student loan payments in 2008. They went 120 days late (6 accounts at the same time). I have a feeling that this is driving my score down alot but getting Sallie Mae to do somthing about the late payments is rather frustrating. Assuming I succeed in getting the lates removed, would I see a decent score increase?
Is it best to pay down my Credit cards over a period ot 9 months or pay them all down to roughly 5% utilization immediately?
Thanks
