@jamie123 wrote:
The Macy's late is really dragging her score down right now because it is less than one year old. 30 day lates seem to lose their power to drag scores down as the years go by, but one 30 day late less than 1 year old is killing her score. You need to get that off of her reports before apping for new cards. Many lenders will deny you because it is a fresh late.
The Lord & Taylor late isn't impacting her scores as much but because of its age and it might be pretty easy to have removed.
If you are planning on applying for a mortgage soon, you want to have ALL of these lates removed beforehand. It is not that difficult to do but does take some persistance. You need to visit the Rebuilding Credit forum on this website and learn how to write GW (Good Will) letters. And really, it is not hard to do once you do the first one. This is the quickest way for your wife to improve her credit scores.
The year before you apply for a mortgage should be a quiet period on your reports with the only activity being you paying your bills on time and keeping your balances low. You can continue to dispute baddies during this time just don't apply for or add any new credit during this time.
Your wife is actually in pretty good shape. Lates are relativly easy to have removed and once that happens she will have clean reports. That is a BIG DEAL!
Just to be perfectly clear: Your wife already has enough credit cards and installment loan history to get the highest scores she is capable of. If you add credit cards now it will actually knock her scores down for about 6 months to a year. She needs to have 1 credit card report less than 10% of its CL and all the other cards report $0 for her best scores.
If you have more than 1 year after you get her reports cleaned up but before you plan on applying for a mortgage, I would suggest adding 2 credit cards. I would suggest apping for the Chase Freedom and the Discover IT cards. Both those cards seem to fit her current profile really well.
Thank very much for your very detailed post. I have couple of follow-up questions.
1) Before sending a GW letter, can we try to handle this over the phone with card services?
2) We would prefer rewards cards to work around what I have (SM MC, Freedom, Discover It - she is an authorized user on these cards). We were thinking along the lines of:
Barclaycard Rewards MC looks attractvie as it is rated for Fair/Good credit and gives 2% on utilities
Quicksilver - 1.5% flat cashback (It's Capital One)
Regular Sapphire - 2% dining, 2% travel through Chase portal (We heavilty use our checking account with Chase)
What is your opinion?
Discover IT $17k / US Bank Ace (VSig) $13.5K / US Bank Cash+ (VSig) $13.5k