Revolving credit - how much do we need and for how long?

[bruiseviolet]

Goal is to get a mortgage by the end of the year / next 12 months.  We are dilligintly working to clean our credit up.

However, I know revolving credit is a part of your FICO and neither my husband nor myself have ANY revolving credit accounts.

I know it's good to have 12 months at least- to show on time payments.  So question- how many revolving credit accounts/tradelines should we have?

And can anyone point me in a direction to get some with a below 600 credit score?

Will getting revolving credit and buying a stick of gum or something and paying it once a month- work?  We really follow Dave Ramsey and do everything cash only- hence the reason we never cleaned up our credit sooner or have any credit cards (except we need a new home- and a mortgage) lol

some people have said to wait and get cards AFTER your credit is cleaned up-  but we need to be out of the place we are living in 6 months and we really really dont want to have to find another place to rent- should we just go for the gusto now?

[Anonymous]

What IS on your credit report? Do you have any open tradelines?

Problem is, anything you open now is going to bring down your AAoA, and also hit you for inquiries. If you have no open TL's, you'll definitely need to open something, but, you probably won't be able to get a house in 6 months. Especially with the housing crisis that just happened, they are more strict with lending. They want to make sure you know how to manage credit. It's hard to assess that when you have no tradelines. They also don't want someone who just went on an appspree looking for anyone who would give them credit. Unless you have other open TL's, I'm afraid you may be needing to find another place to rent for another year or two while you build some credit. But again, it depends on what's actually on your reports.

[bruiseviolet]

Ok maybe I am confused then.  We have open accounts- they are student loans and for the past 12 months have been on time (a total of 5 open student loan accounts).  Will those be ok to count as open?  What are we better off to do- do the PFD and DV/HIPPA stuff we are doing for the negative stuff to get our scores up?  or should we open a credit card or two now?  what will be more advantagous in the long run?

[bruiseviolet]

let me try to explain this a little better....

we have a little over 30 tradelines combined on our reports.  

Most of them are old medical bills that went into collections.

We have 5 of them that I ust sent out PFD letters today.

1 of them i paid off a long time ago- and sent a GW letter to hopefully have it removed.

5 of them are student loans, which we haven't had any lates on in over a year.  (mine have never had lates, but his did about 18 months ago).

We have zero credit cards.

Does that help explain it a little better?  All of the score simulators i've used have only showed an increase in score if we were to open some credit cards.

I really don't want to if we don't have too....

Because the baddies are all older (4 years or older- aside from his late student loan payment) I was under the impression, as long as we got our scores up, that we would have a good chance to get through manual underwriting (this is what our loan officer told us 3 months ago).  Is that a correct assumption?  (because we can prove rent payments that have never been late since 2006 and the 12+  months of on-time student loans) that our real only thing stopping us from a mortgage at this point was our actual FICO scores.