Pay off Car loan - With repo 3-4 years ago

[Anonymous]

Hello there,

First time post, and Dr. Google hasn't been super helpful for me.

I went through some terrible financial straights 2-3 years ago, culminating in significant delinquency on my credit cards, and a repo on our van.

Additionally, I had a Ch7 Bankruptcy in 2012.

I've got a Great income now (133k last year), and early 2020 brought current all of the delinquent cards, and in Nov19, our van was only repod for 2 hours -- before we paid to bring it current.  We still have 33 months remaining on the Van loan

We improved our credit enough to Buy a half million dollar home last year, A Nice Truck, and get 2 small credit cards, with a 2k and 1k limit.  The Revolving balance utilization is usually around 30% or so.  

All of that said -- my credit score is pretty well stuck at 650ish.  None of the simulator options let me take it up to over 700, and so I'm wondering,

Does Paying off the Van, with the delinquencies& Repo 2+ years ago, Help me, by closing an account with negative information;  -- or -- will it hurt me on average age of credit, or some other metric i'm not thinking of.

Worth noting, I've got student loans from 2008, so I'll still have some decent Long term credit payment history as well.

Thanks so much for the advice.  

[4sallypat]

Paying off your van loan early will help the overall debt to income ratio but will hurt your score a bit for a short period of time due to the closed auto loan.

You have a good credit mix (auto, revolving credit, installment credit, mortgage) so I'd keep paying on them.

If you are buying another house, that would be a good idea to free up debt, but if your goal is to get your scores higher, I would opt to keep making payments on the van and get a credit card increase or lower your utilization.

By keeping the cards down low under 10%, your score will rise.

[Anonymous]

Even on billing cycles they are at 0% utilization, score still stuck around 680.

At this point, pretty much a gotta out-wait the old stuff stage?

Thanks again.