What to pay off?

[Anonymous]

I have been very fortunate to have been put into a position to pay off all of my debts suddenly and I wanted some advice from the boards on the best way of doing so without actually HURTING my credit score.  I have read plenty on here about keeping total utilization under 10% to maximize my score.  Is that correct?  For example, I have $50,000 in total debt (car loans, student loans, CC's, etc) - I am going to pay off the high interest car loan completley but I was thinking about paying the credit cards down to 10-15% of the balance.

As much as I would love to see everything say $0 I also want to take care of my credit score so that I can purchase a home in 3-4 years.  Any thoughts would be appreciated!  My current scores are between 610-648 - my utilization across the board is sky high right now at 85-95%

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

You are going to get a better answer if you list the debts, interest rate, balance and credit limit. 

There are two schools of thought on this here.  One is pay off lowest balances first and the other is to pay the highest interest rates first.  Generally for optimal scoring you want one card reporting a balance of under 10% but making all your cards report below 30% would give you a boost.

[gdale6]

Take care of you revolving debt first there is more of an impact on Fico there than with installment loans. Pay all off and just let 1 card report no more than 9% of its individual CL to the CRAs each month. You only need 1 open installment loan to appease Fico, so on these pay off highest interest rate ones first.