Paying Credit Cards and Changes in Credit Scores

[Anonymous]

My husband and I had about $11,000 in credit card debt and we were able to just pay it off this week....yippie!!!! Anyway, we are hoping to buy a house very soon and are curious as to how long we should expect it to take for our credit scores to go up after paying off the credit cards. (The combined total limit on the cards was about $16,000). Thanks for the help! 

[frogfan12]

It should all update within the next month. When did you guys pay and when does the statement cut? That's really what determines it. 

[Anonymous]

Just paid yesterday and looks like the statement date on the big card was 5/6/12, so I guess it wouldn't post until 6/6/12?

[DaveSignal]

Depends when your creditors update.... usually it is on the date of the statement and shows up on the reports a few days later.  But you will see an immediate increase in score when that happens.

[cableguy123]

to get the best boost you need to have your ulti at about 9% if you pay them all off there is a chance your score will drop more!

[Anonymous]

What?!?!? What does that mean? What is ulti? Why would paying off my credit cards make my score go down? I didn't close the cards. I have never heard that before!

[Anonymous]

There is a so called sweetspot between 1 and 9% of your available credit limit posting when the statement is cut and thereby reported to the credit reporting agencies. Paying all credit cards to zero looks like your are credit dead to FICO so leave all cards at zero and one at a small balance for maximum FICO yield and pay it off before the credit card company charges interest...

[frogfan12]

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@Anonymous wrote:
What?!?!? What does that mean? What is ulti? Why would paying off my credit cards make my score go down? I didn't close the cards. I have never heard that before!

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Util = utilization. Or how much (percentage wise) of your available credit that you are currently using. The FICO credit scoring models all weigh fairly heavily on revolving credit. Paying your util. down will cause your score to increase...sometimes by quite a bit if you have a great deal of debt. 

[Anonymous]

Ok, thanks everyone for all the help! Well, I don't really think we are credit dead. I really feel very good about having paid off the credit cards and we will still use them but will just pay them off every month. We still have a car loan that we pay every month and quite a bit of student loans that we pay every month. Is there anything else we should/could be doing?

[FrugalRican]

Is there anything else that needs to be taken care of? Like collections?

BTW, just use ONE of your cards, charge something like $10 on it and let it report on STATEMENT date, and then pay in FULL before the DUE date, and that should give you a minor boost rather than letting all of your cards report at $0. Financially, it makes no sense, but FICO is not a representation of how you are doing financially, so it makes more sense for FICO scoring purposes to let just one of your cards to report a small balance.

This is what the others were talking about.