Question about rebuilding my credit....kinda long but i need help! :)

[shortstuf283]

my husband and i are trying to rebuild our credit in order to obtain a mortgage. currently my score is 513 and his is 488. I have about 3300 in old credit card debt that needs to go bye bye. My question is would it help my score more by paying this down monthly? We've started paying them off, but they haven't hit our report yet. Also the two we paid off, we took a settlement on both. Does this hurt my credit more? I would LOVE to be at least in the 600 range for both of us by the end of the year...sooner if possible! Also, can someone tell me...in order to see if my credit has improved do I need to buy "todays score" I'm paying the $8.99 a month to monitor, I'm just confused as to why I would need to purchase another report for $15. Thank you!

[Anonymous]

If the accounts were charged off, settling won't hurt you anymore than the CO is.

If you have SW, you will get alerts as your score changes, but not new reports.

If you want to monitor your reports, I would check over on General Credit Issues and look for a monitoring service.