Did I hurt My Credit Score

[Anonymous]

Happy New Year From Kiev;

I am new to the credit monitoring world and in reading up on what affects your score I noticed that a change I made on my CCs may have hurt my score. Then there is a CC debt to CL ratio issue I would like some feedback on also.

I have two questions:

1- I lowered my credit limit on my two primary CCs from 30K to 15K. I pay off the balance every month no matter what it is. Should I go back to the higher CL to improve my ratios between the balances I carry and the CL?

2-I have a Lowes account that is 0% with no payments for 12 months and the CL is maxed out. I used this to help renovate a home with the plan to sell the home before the one year deadline. I know this is negatively affecting my score so I though about refinancing the home and taking equity from the house to pay off the Lowes card. Since a mortgage is not a revolving line of credit and these are looked at separately in calculating my score, could doing this help to improve my score?

Any acurate adivce would help.

Thanks

[marty56]

Welcome to the forum.  As long as your total %util doesn't go above 9% and the uitl on card  that you lowered your util on does go above 9%, you will be fine.

It is never a good idea to use a HELOC to pay off unsecured debt.  If you get a HELOC, you would probably get a score hit on the new loan and based on how the maxed out CC is affecting your score, your rates might also get affected too.  Also since the new loan will be marked as new for a year, and the Lowes card will be paid off in the same time period, it makes little sense to do this anyway.

As you pay the lowes card's balance down, your scores will go up if they are being affected by the maxed out card.

Again do not take out the HELOC and just by the Lowes card off in 12 months or less.