Fastest Way to Raise Credit?

[Anonymous]

Howdy all,

I recently applied for a mortgage and got declined for low credit. Minimum required is 640 and the bank said my 3 scores were around 590, 615 and 620. Those three scores are lower than my fico score and CK scores, but either way I need to improve.

I have 4 cards: cap1 with $0 balance, Amazon storecard with $0 balance, discover with 60% utilization and a Kohl's store card with %20 utilization, all adding up to about 20% utilization of my total available credit.

My plan is to pay every card 100% off, use the cap1 card for everyday things and remain under 10% utilization on that card. Then after 45 days, double check my fico score and reapply for the mortgage.

My only concern is that my credit either won't rise fast enough or the banks report will still be much lower than my real score.
Any advice or tips on how I can boost my credit in such a short time frame?

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Howdy all,

I recently applied for a mortgage and got declined for low credit. Minimum required is 640 and the bank said my 3 scores were around 590, 615 and 620. Those three scores are lower than my fico score and CK scores, but either way I need to improve.

I have 4 cards: cap1 with $0 balance, Amazon storecard with $0 balance, discover with 60% utilization and a Kohl's store card with %20 utilization, all adding up to about 20% utilization of my total available credit.

My plan is to pay every card 100% off, use the cap1 card for everyday things and remain under 10% utilization on that card. Then after 45 days, double check my fico score and reapply for the mortgage.

My only concern is that my credit either won't rise fast enough or the banks report will still be much lower than my real score.
Any advice or tips on how I can boost my credit in such a short time frame?

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Note that the one card you leave a balance on, you actually want to shoot for under 8.9% of that card's limit.

Fixing your utilization is going to help a lot, but it sounds from your scores like you have derogatory accounts on your CR that you need to work on. What's going on there?

[Anonymous]

The OP without question has a dirty file.  The question then is how dirty, can it be cleaned up, etc. 

With aggregate utilization at 20% and a single card at 60% utilization, you'd probably stand to gain around 30 points by bringing your 60% utilization card to $0 and then having one card report a small balance every month.  ~30 points isn't bad, but it's not a huge gain and likely wouldn't be the make or break difference in being to obtain the mortgage.  The real change in score would come from taking your dirty file to a clean one, but that can certainly take time depending on the extent of how dirty it is.

[SouthJamaica]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Howdy all,

I recently applied for a mortgage and got declined for low credit. Minimum required is 640 and the bank said my 3 scores were around 590, 615 and 620. Those three scores are lower than my fico score and CK scores, but either way I need to improve.

I have 4 cards: cap1 with $0 balance, Amazon storecard with $0 balance, discover with 60% utilization and a Kohl's store card with %20 utilization, all adding up to about 20% utilization of my total available credit.

My plan is to pay every card 100% off, use the cap1 card for everyday things and remain under 10% utilization on that card. Then after 45 days, double check my fico score and reapply for the mortgage.

My only concern is that my credit either won't rise fast enough or the banks report will still be much lower than my real score.
Any advice or tips on how I can boost my credit in such a short time frame?

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The fastest way to increase your scores is to make sure all but one of the cards reports at zero balance and the remaining card reports a small balance (like $20 or so).

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

Thanks for the responses! To my knowledge, the biggest issue with my credit report is that my credit history is short. I'm a pretty young guy and my first credit account was a very small vehicle loan that was opened 2 years ago. It's been closed and had no late payments, etc. My report shows no late payments, all accounts are "in good standing". Additionally, I do have more inquiries than I should-- CK shows 10 and Discover Fico shows 1 in the last 12 months. I had attempted to reduce my utilization by getting a new card, thus increasing my total available credit... But my high balances proved to be too high risk for any credit companies.

As of right now I have short credit history, with my first card only being about a year old, and have had very high utilization (about 90% avg) for the past 6 months. I expect dropping down to almost 0% utilization will give me a large spike, but I was curious how to get the best results. Sounds like AZEO is going to be my friend!

[Anonymous]

Here's a picture of my Discover FICO report(no confidential details included). I'm fairly confident that my biggest trips are high number of inquiries and short credit history. I'm really hoping that getting my utilization from about 80% to around 5% in the span of a month will kickstart me back up.
https://imgur.com/gallery/rNjlV4Q

[SouthJamaica]

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@Anonymous wrote:
Here's a picture of my Discover FICO report(no confidential details included). I'm fairly confident that my biggest trips are high number of inquiries and short credit history. I'm really hoping that getting my utilization from about 80% to around 5% in the span of a month will kickstart me back up.
https://imgur.com/gallery/rNjlV4Q

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Yes it will

[Anonymous]

If as you say your file is clean and the only drawback is your short history and high balances on all bureaus then paying down your balances to less than 9% should propel your scores to around 700 depending on the number of the inquiries you have on each. For example if your experian report has only 1 inquiry then your experian score should be above 700.

[Anonymous]

I still have my doubts that the OP has a clean file.  It's not often that you see high 500's or low 600's scores with just high utilization.  Possible I suppose, but I'd imagine that there's something unclean on at least one account.  Perhaps the OP isn't even aware of it if it does exist.

[Anonymous]

What would be the most common cause for a dirty file? Delinquent accounts or collections, I assume?

I have a chance to look at the complete credit report that the bank pulled for my mortgage application, so hopefully I'll be able to gain some insight as to what my biggest problem is.