Only 1 active card

[klondike]

My current median score is 585 and I thought it was 631 based on the fakos from transunion. I am working on cleaning up my score so I can get the VA mortgage in the spring.

I currently have just my NFCU rewards card with a CL of 2,000.00 and a balance of 800. Would it help to open up another card to use for gas and small purchases?

If yes, what would be the best card that I could qualify for with a 585?

Thanks,

Michael.

[brianjb]

A major thing hurting you is that you are using 40% of your available credit.  Number one job would be to pay that card off, or down as low as you can.

[tattooedhusker]

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@brianjb wrote:

A major thing hurting you is that you are using 40% of your available credit.  Number one job would be to pay that card off, or down as low as you can.

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+1

[brianjb]

Another piece of advice is to pull your credit reports (all three) and look at what's on them.  There may be other things causing your score to be low (collections, lates, etc).

Work on cleaning those up as well.

[klondike]

I thought have an active card with no balance was a negative?

[klondike]

I have a report from the lender from yesterday which includes all 3.

[ForMyBiz]

The experts can chime in here, but with one card you want to keep your utilization below 10% but above 1% I believe.  They often recommend letting multiple cards report $0 balances and only 1 card report a small balance that falls below 10%, with some of the guys wtih top scores keeping that number even lower (like below 5%).  This, from what I understand, shows that you do use available credit, but you're not in over your head, so-to-speak.

[klondike]

Ok, I will pay it down then as I have the cash.

Any ideas on what that may do to the scores?

[ForMyBiz]

I can only speak for myself, but I had rather high utilization across multiple cards (above 70%).  When I brought that down below 30% my score jumped almost 40 points.  But as another poster mentioned, you'll want to make sure there's nothing else going on with your reports too, like collections, charge-offs, lates, etc.  If you haven't done so recently, go grab all three reports and check them, free through annualcreditreport.com.   The other factors are Average Age of Accounts (AAoA) and number of inquiries.  If you can post all of that info I'd bet the guys around here can give you a better idea about where your score might go by paying down your debt on your one card.

[klondike]

I submitted a CLI for my NFCU rewards card and they bumped it to 10k over night

I also paid the card down to 500, so my util is now 5%. 3 of my collections will be submitted by the agency next Friday.