Supposedly it doesn't actually qualify you for anything more than whatever the highest bracket is (760?) but I'm psyched anyways. We paid off a large amount of debt with my spring bonus, but then we added a bit back on for a new refrigerator. We can easily support the debt amount, so I don't worry about it, but we're trying to 'clean up' our finances, in general. In doing that, we're going to consolidate the remaining debt and put it on one card, via a 3.99%-for-life transfer check. It so happens that account is just in my wife's name, so doing so will eliminate all revolving debt from my report. I will still have two mortgages and two car loans, and plenty of history and mix, so I'm anticipating this move will put me over the top. My EQ FICO is currently 791.
This may adversely affect my wife slightly, as the one account will be at 89% utilization. Her overall utilization will be at 27% (revolving only), so I don't think it will be that bad. What's hurting her is one late on her report that we unsuccessfully tried to get removed. It was a true late, but was her only one in a long history with the account, so we tried for a good faith removal, but were summarily and curtly dismissed. She's still at an EQ FICO of 749, even after that spring debt payoff, and our history and mix is almost identical, so it's clearly the late holding her back. We'll pay off this consolidated debt within the next year, and hopefully the late continues to get less weight and she'll start the trek toward 800 as well.
I'm nervous to pull our other bureau scores b/c I seem to notice the TU and EX seem to be much lower than EQ, but I probably should. Is it common for lenders to use one exclusively and not look at the others? We are exploring one, possibly two, car purchases in the coming months, and I fear I may run into someone who doesn't look at EQ but not sure if it's worth forking over $60-odd to get the other two reports for each of us.
