Have you used the score simulator- if so did it match your score when you completed the action?

[tangerinze]

Wondering because it tells me that paying my bills on time for two months and paying off my card balances will give me an 80 pt jump. 

That seems insane to me because I have about 18 90 day lates.. they are all about 2.5 years old now & have had good payment history both before and after the slump. Had a 780 score now rebuilding from 400 but hey, its at the 600 mark today, good enough to qualify for an FHA mortgage. woo. I did get two collections removed and settled a charged off card balance, but no one is budging on the lates (even when my student loan servicer should remove 9 90 days becayse I WAS enrolled) but that's besides the point. Also using about 80% of my revolving balances but that recently is down from over 100%. 

So to answer my question- when you completed what the simulator said you should do- did your score make the move it calculated?

thanks!

[Anonymous]

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@tangerinze wrote:

Wondering because it tells me that paying my bills on time for two months and paying off my card balances will give me an 80 pt jump. 

That seems insane to me because I have about 18 90 day lates.. they are all about 2.5 years old now & have had good payment history both before and after the slump. Had a 780 score now rebuilding from 400 but hey, its at the 600 mark today, good enough to qualify for an FHA mortgage. woo. I did get two collections removed and settled a charged off card balance, but no one is budging on the lates (even when my student loan servicer should remove 9 90 days becayse I WAS enrolled) but that's besides the point. Also using about 80% of my revolving balances but that recently is down from over 100%. 

So to answer my question- when you completed what the simulator said you should do- did your score make the move it calculated?

thanks!

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I have heard they are not that reliable.  Mine said opening a new account would help yet it didn't.

Rightt now it says to pay down my student loans to 0 and I would get a huge jump.  There is no way I can pay them all off right now lol

Basically it is saying making one payment on my student loans will cause my FICO scores to jump between 15-30 points.  Which would be nice if that is the case.

It also says paying down my credit cards (I pay in full each month) will help.  I think it will help just by lowering my utlization.  I am in rebuild status right now so we will see what happens.

It seems everything is coming down to keeping my utilization down on my cards.

I also have some negatives that will be dropping off soon.

[Anonymous]

The 90 day LATES will unfortunately continue to punish/cap your Fico score until they fall off or are removed. And no, that bump is not likely with that action. Is this a fico SIM  or is it Vantage Score?

[Anonymous]

I agree with Zipper that it would be helpful to know from what service you are getting the simulator.  My guess is that it is the sim associated with the myFICO Ultimate product.

That kind of point gain is conceivable if you have a 600 score now, given that your cards are at 80% which is very bad.  Certainly it would help you a lot, and it would be a good thing to do for other reasons too.

What you'd want to do is to pay all cards to $0 except one, with the remaining card steadily reporting a small balance (like $20).

[Anonymous]

Don't trust simulators.  They are a guess and that's it.  You'll get better guesses from the members of this forum.

Currently your negative payment history which makes up 35% of your score and your utlization which makes up 30% of your score are in a bad place.  The utilization can be fixed as quickly as you can pay off your debt.  Taking your overall utilization down from 80% to 1% would result in a significant score increase, which I would ballpark to be in the range of 60-90 points.  Of course this can vary greatly from profile to profile. 

As far as the payment history, you're either going to be "dirty" or "clean."  All it takes to be "dirty" is one major negative item and you've said you have many.  Since your payment history lands you in a dirty bucket, the only way to get out is to remove all negative items.  Removing just a few may have you see a point or two increase here and there, but since you'll still be "dirty" until the final negative item is removed your score will still be held back considerably.  Depending on profile, removal of the "final" negative item could result in a scoring increase of 40-100 points. 

As you can see if you were to clean up both your utilization and your payment history completely, your score would increase significantly.  At a midpoint of 145 points, that would take you from a 600 score to a 745.  You can see how important payment history and keeping utilization are low when you think about these numbers!