@HeavenOhio wrote:
If you request a product-change on your Capital One card, you'll probably be offered the Quicksilver (no fee) or Savor (no fee). Either of those are fine choices. Avoid the QuicksilverOne and its fee.
Regarding the rest, I'd:
- Bring utilization down to 8.9% or below.
- Apply for one more card.
- Close Credit One
- Garden until the car loan.
That'll set you up with three good cards from good banks. When it comes time to apply for your auto loan, make sure that one card is reporting a small balance (at least $5 but not much more than that), with the other two cards reporting zero. That'll optimize the revolving portion of your score.
If one of your cards is a Chase card, let it report zero and choose a different card to report the small balance. In addition to reporting the statement balance, Chase reports zero whenever you pay to zero, and all cards reporting zero will ding your score by 15–20 points. You may as well have their policy working for you rather than against you.
I used the Credit Karma and Experian simulator to see the effects for closing Credit One. Are they usually pretty "accurate"? My score would decrease by 6 points and it said that it would take less than 3 months to recover which in my opinion doesn't seem so bad. Opening a new credit card would also decrease my score my additional 6 points. That's fair... Also, I noticed that chase doesn't have anything on the site to check for pre qual's. Should I wait on an offer since my score should be increasing next week due to paying down my credit card debt?
