@Anonymous, sorry to say, but the damage has been done because of those five new cards, closing them may actually drop your score a point or two further. Had you stayed the course and simply paid down your existing cards your scores would have recovered almost as fast as they dropped.
To add insult to injury, the closing of your vehicle loan, assuming it was the only personal loan you had, will also drop your scores further.
I can't speak for the impact of the loan specifically. I know when I paid of my car loan, my score tanked since it was the only personal installment loan on my profile. As far as utilization .. utilization has no memory, so as soon as your utilization goes down, you should see your scores increase.
@Anonymous wrote:Long read but I'm desperately looking for answers..........
Okay,
So I've maintained an 800 score for a couple years now and always pay my card balances off monthly (rarely ever carrying a balance 30 days). I foolishly used most of my available credit in January and February of this year on our wedding and honeymoon as well a few thousand to keep my business running during the slow months. I had no idea utilizing 90% of my credit would tank my score so horribly (almost 200 points).
I knew I would only carry these balances for a couple months and then pay them back off so I wasn't too concerned until my score tanked once they all finally reported.
(Total card utilization 28k on 8 cards).
I called the card issuers and asked for limits to be increased hoping this would lower my % of utilization to available ratio however, all of the issuers refused.
In a panic, I opened a few smaller credit cards to help with the ratio (5 total, all of them for 1000.00 or less) which tanked the score even more......those 5 cards have never been used or even activated but are reported as new accounts.
I have since started paying off the cards in large payments and have half of the cards at/or below 30% and the other half will be within the next 30 days. The half I've paid still haven't reported yet so I'm not sure where I'll end up. In the meantime, my 2018 truck broke down for the 3rd time (Dodge Transmission)......so the dealership finally agreed to buy me out of the truck and pay off the balance of my loan. In trying to replace my truck at another dealership, I've learned no dealership can help me with my score being so low and my credit usage so high.......I never thought in a million years I'd go from an 800 score to not being able to buy a vehicle with 100% on time payments my entire life.
According to credit karma I'm now at a 535 and have zero collections, late payments or bad debts........What can I do to fix this???
If I close the 5 cards that I recently opened in a panic but never used, will the 40 to 50 points lost by opening too many accounts in a short period be given back?
Can I expect to see my score improve enough over the next month or 2 once my cards report less than 30% utilization to be able to purchase a new truck
How badly will closing my old truck loan further damage my score? (Truck loan was only open for 18 months and hasn't reported 0.00 balance as of yet)
Thank you for reading.....any and all advice is very appreciated!!
1. Don't close anything. It won't help you to close anything.
2. Activate your cards, and use each once in a while.
3. Let as many of them as possible report zero balances.
4. Stop looking at Credit Karma. The scores there are Vantage scores, and therefore meaningless.
5. I doubt paying off the truck loan would hurt you, but I don't know what this means "the dealership finally agreed to buy me out of the truck and pay off the balance of my loan".
6. Your FICO scores will come back up
