Hello .... just wanted to say a quick hi as this is my first post and big thank you to all that are regular contributors of this board. It's been so helpful to me!
I've been slightly obsessed with raising my score for last 5 months as I'm trying to get a mortgage. I had a painful divorce a few years ago and went through a serious depression where I put my head in the sand for a year after with finances and got into some credit trouble. It wasn't alot of money but two bank credit card chargeoffs (about $1000 each) as well as some late payments on a car loan that brought my credit score down into 500's.
My question is about how to raise my Fico score that is the older model used by Mortgage lenders. It seems to not want to move at all. My FICO 8 score for Equifax just shot up 51 points after I paid in full the BoA credit card chargeoff and the balance went to 0 but it didn't change the Equifax 5.0 score for mortages at all - not even one point! I only care about my scores that mortgage lenders see. Any tips on what changes I can make that will rasie these scores?
Here are my numbers - Fico 8 first and then the Mortgage sccore (5, 4 or 2) are second:
Equifax: 642/554
TransUnion 597/560
Experiean - 582/611
I have two Capitol One Credit cards (total credit line 3000 betwen them). They both now have 0 balance. One of them is 5 years old, 2nd one was opened 10 months ago.
The two chargeoffs I paid in full in last month - it was a total of about $2200 that was showing as a balance. Equifax is only one that has updated taking off one of them and giving me a bump up on the Fico 8 Score. The other one should come off soon and show that I don't have any outstanding balance. I had a car installment loan with a bunch of late payments (divorce drama) but I finally paid it of in full about 1.5 years ago.
And final question .. who uses Fico 8 anyway? They say it's the most widely used but then give you all these additional scores for mortage, auto, credit card. Aren't those the 3 main industries that use credit scores?
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers and Happy Friday
Amy
