My husband and I are buying a new house and working on the mortgage. We're trying to bump up to a lower interest rate thanks to the recent spike - we are locked in right now but don't close until end of Feb, so our lender says we can pull the report again.
He was at 675 mid-Sept. According to credit karma, the worst things on his acct=
* 1 late payment (30 days) on our car loan last April (it was in an accident and totaled, we thought Gap Insurance was paying it off and didn't realize we had to keep making payments until it kicked in... as soon as we figured that out we paid it)
* Low avg age of accounts
* Other info = No credit cards with balances - just 1 car loan - no mortgage right now (we sold our home earlier this year) - a TON of student loans (in deferrment bc he was in school full-time and graduated this year)
The lender suggested I add him as an authorized user on my oldest CC account (about 13 years) and we did that which resulted in the 10-point bump when she re-pulled in December. But we really needed to get to 700.
Now... we contacted the credit union that had the auto loan and asked about removing the late payment. They said we had to file a dispute with the credit bureaus (which we did about a week ago). We also just paid off one $9000 installment loan (not really for his credit, moreso to increase monthly cash flow). When I added him to the CC account, now he has "30% credit card utilization" which I'm sure isn't helping but I am not sure we can really pay it completely down.
Any other ideas for things we can do to try to bump up the score 15 points in a short amount of time?
ETA -- we also have a bunch of inquiries, I think the last count on his was . Some from this round of buying the house, plus we had refinanced our last house in 2015, and we had gotten that new car earlier this year.
