@Anonymous wrote:
I am thinking on waiting until May. What can I expect my score to do with on time payments on one card with under 9% utilization? Does it increase 10 points a month, more, less?
It is very hard to say how many points a given profile would get because there are many factors involved in scoring -- age of oldest account, average age of accounts, recent inquiries aging off starting at 6 months, new account penalties, etc.
Back in September due to Irma I had a few cards report very high utilization versus AZEO utilization and I ended up getting punched for 50 FICO points because of it, but only for a month since I immediately paid in full all my cards but one and paid that one down to $5 balance just so I could report a balance.
But the big factor here is that if you're "rebuilding credit", you can't be building debt balances again. So if your goal is to rebuild, you have to start a budget and stick to the budget and not be spending more than you can afford to pay off in a month. If your income is so thin that you can't do this, you aren't rebuilding credit unfortunately. It sucks to hear, I know it, but most people either rebuild credit (keep utilization perfect) or they just go back to building debt, which got them in trouble in the first place.
I would suggest you go over your budget one more time and tweak it to something you can absolutely stick to so you can attack those balances out. To me, if I saw someone with derogatories in the past and they are already back up to 50% or more utilization on every card, I'd consider them a huge risk. You want to show your best face to creditors and future landlords, which means if you have to eat beans and rice for every meal for 3 months, do it. You can definitely get a good FICO increase.
Will it be 10 points or 20 points or 40 points? Nobody really knows, but if you do in fact nuke those balances, please report back with your new scores so we have more data points,
