topic OK I AM NEW TO THIS.. in Credit Cards

OK I AM NEW TO THIS..

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:35:49 GMT

I'm starting to think I need to get my credit up because as of right now I have three credit cards. Two of them have $500 limits and one has $400. My score is 576. The main thing I am trying to make better is my revolving credit. I have maxed out all of my cards for the last 2 months. Should I keep maxing them all out and paying them off or can I just use say $100 a month on each one and pay them off? What would be the best way to make my score go up and my credit limits?

Re: OK I AM NEW TO THIS..

autofly — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:51:40 GMT

c1inana wrote:
I'm starting to think I need to get my credit up because as of right now I have three credit cards. Two of them have $500 limits and one has $400. My score is 576. The main thing I am trying to make better is my revolving credit. I have maxed out all of my cards for the last 2 months. Should I keep maxing them all out and paying them off or can I just use say $100 a month on each one and pay them off? What would be the best way to make my score go up and my credit limits?

You do not want to max them out. You want to have between 1%-9% utilization. So basically right now you have $1400 credit. Pay one off. Pay the other two down to less than 10% of their limit. You want to continue to do this every month. Do not ever allow more than 9% util to report. You also don't want all of them to report 0%.

See this:

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/fico/board/message?board.id=ficoscoring&thread.id=2654

And let me be the first to welcome you to your new online family.

Auto

Re: OK I AM NEW TO THIS..

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:02:42 GMT

c1inana wrote:
I'm starting to think I need to get my credit up because as of right now I have three credit cards. Two of them have $500 limits and one has $400. My score is 576. The main thing I am trying to make better is my revolving credit. I have maxed out all of my cards for the last 2 months. Should I keep maxing them all out and paying them off or can I just use say $100 a month on each one and pay them off? What would be the best way to make my score go up and my credit limits?

First of all NEVER max out your cards. there is athread here called credit scoring 101 that will explain how the FICO looks at different parts of your credit profile. Optimumly, you should never use more than 30% of your over all avail credit which would be 300.00 at any one time and try not to have any card over the 50% mark if possible.

The first big increase would be to get those card reportng balances down to less than 300.00 total. Once you do this you should see a good jump in score and your creditors may reward you for it if you maintain it for several months.

No need to apply for new credit at this moment until we get the practices of the FICO scoring model down.