My TU score increased 41 points today, from 646 to 687. It's pretty amazing. This is the first time I've seen the color yellow and the words 'good' associated with my credit score. Needless to say, I'm pretty happy about it.
I also purchased my TU credit report to see what could have caused the increase. The only difference is that my report now shows a history of on-time payments on my revolving lines of credit--Visa, MasterCard and two store cards. Most of those lines are less than a year old. I opened them because, after joining this forum, I realized having only one card--a secured Capital One card with a $300 limit--wasn't sufficient to demonstrate to the credit reporting agencies that I can now use credit responsibly. I opened that card way back in 2011, and hadn't applied for any credit cards since then. So, in January of this year I applied for several cards based on MYFICO recommendations for my credit score, and was approved for most of them--an unsecured Cap One Quicksilver One MC, Barclaycard MC, a Chase Zappos Visa, a Shell gas card and two store cards (Comenity/J. Crew and Synchrony/Amazon). The average credit line for which I was approved was about $500.
As this forum predicted, my FICO score did take a slight drop in January after opening the accounts, and it's stayed around 620 - 640. Since then, I've kept my balance on almost all cards showing 0%, and my overal usage around 30%. (I still need to lower that, I know, to under 10%.) All my cards are set to pay the minimum automatically, just to be sure I never miss a payment. Otherwise, I do what this forum has recommended: I make all purchases with one or two cards instead of ever using my debit card--so things such as groceries, gas, clothes, etc. Everything on the cards. And then I pay them in full once or twice each month. This 'strategy,' otherwise known as responsible credit line usage, apparently helped my FICO score tremendously.
Oh, and my Cap One unsecured line was raised from $500 to $1,500 recently too.
Thank you everyone for your good advice. This forum is such a great resource.
Ch13 filed 3/2009 : discharged 1/2014
