Hi, sealdog, welcome to the forums, and you're off to a great start! Lenders should adore you soon, if they don't already.
How old is your mortgage and your two cards? Probably right now the main thing working against you is newness, and it's obvious what corrects that. Once every account is 1 year old, and then two years old, your scores will be helped.
And I can see that you're trying to figure out the timing thing. When you talk about pulling your FAKO's almost every day, are you talking about checking your reports on TrueCredit or a similar 3-in-1 service? Because those are great tools, as long as you ignore the scores. The reports are all you need. TrueCredit and some others will display the exact date of the month that an account updates, or at any rate, they display this on TU and EX. If you have been saving your 3-in-1's to your hard drive, see which dates the CC's updated on for the last several months. Of course, TU has been a mess recently, and EQ and EX have had their moments too, but compare the dates reported with the dates on your statements. With luck, your cards update on their statement dates.
So what that means is, you want to go online 4 or 5 days before you think your cards are due to post again and pay the balance down or off. For simplicity's sake, I would pay off the $1K card, so that it reports $0 on statement date (or whenever it reports), and allow a balance of between $50 and $250 (1-5% ) to report on the $5K card. (Then be sure to pay it off.) With two cards, this is as fancy as you're going to be able to get. Don't worry about going into hurry-up mode on the mortgage, at least not for scoring purposes. Just keep paying the mortgage on time.
Supposedly, for ideal FICO credit mix, you might also pick up a gas or retail card, one that does NOT have Visa, MasterCard, etc showing on it. So the all-orange Home Depot card is a store card, but the white Home Depot MasterCard with little tools floating around is considered a bank card. The Sears card is a store card only if it doesn't say MasterCard on it --if it does, it's a bank card. Same on gas cards, if there are any left without Visa or MC on them. But store cards can be a PITA --high APR's, frequently quirky reporting --so don't get one unless it's for a store where you actually shop, it gives you good deals, you're prepared to PIF it every month, and it's backed by a decent bank.
You're actually in a position that many of us would envy --good clean credit, although short, and knowing what you're doing. We all suffer from a case of if-only-I'd-known-then when we read posts like yours! If you want to see what the classic "FICO High Achievers" look like, check out the following thread, and you can plan your credit future to look like theirs:
http://ficoforums.myfico.com/fico/board/message?board.id=ficoscoring&thread.id=12673
Otherwise, the most important things that you can do for now is to keep learning about credit, let time do its thing, and never be anywhere even close to being late.
How old is your mortgage and your two cards? Probably right now the main thing working against you is newness, and it's obvious what corrects that. Once every account is 1 year old, and then two years old, your scores will be helped.
And I can see that you're trying to figure out the timing thing. When you talk about pulling your FAKO's almost every day, are you talking about checking your reports on TrueCredit or a similar 3-in-1 service? Because those are great tools, as long as you ignore the scores. The reports are all you need. TrueCredit and some others will display the exact date of the month that an account updates, or at any rate, they display this on TU and EX. If you have been saving your 3-in-1's to your hard drive, see which dates the CC's updated on for the last several months. Of course, TU has been a mess recently, and EQ and EX have had their moments too, but compare the dates reported with the dates on your statements. With luck, your cards update on their statement dates.
So what that means is, you want to go online 4 or 5 days before you think your cards are due to post again and pay the balance down or off. For simplicity's sake, I would pay off the $1K card, so that it reports $0 on statement date (or whenever it reports), and allow a balance of between $50 and $250 (1-5% ) to report on the $5K card. (Then be sure to pay it off.) With two cards, this is as fancy as you're going to be able to get. Don't worry about going into hurry-up mode on the mortgage, at least not for scoring purposes. Just keep paying the mortgage on time.
Supposedly, for ideal FICO credit mix, you might also pick up a gas or retail card, one that does NOT have Visa, MasterCard, etc showing on it. So the all-orange Home Depot card is a store card, but the white Home Depot MasterCard with little tools floating around is considered a bank card. The Sears card is a store card only if it doesn't say MasterCard on it --if it does, it's a bank card. Same on gas cards, if there are any left without Visa or MC on them. But store cards can be a PITA --high APR's, frequently quirky reporting --so don't get one unless it's for a store where you actually shop, it gives you good deals, you're prepared to PIF it every month, and it's backed by a decent bank.
You're actually in a position that many of us would envy --good clean credit, although short, and knowing what you're doing. We all suffer from a case of if-only-I'd-known-then when we read posts like yours! If you want to see what the classic "FICO High Achievers" look like, check out the following thread, and you can plan your credit future to look like theirs:
http://ficoforums.myfico.com/fico/board/message?board.id=ficoscoring&thread.id=12673
Otherwise, the most important things that you can do for now is to keep learning about credit, let time do its thing, and never be anywhere even close to being late.
thanks for the heads up one of the mod's ask me to post it in cc and give a little more details. I will remember your suggestion on posting next time. and thanks for all the assistance.
got my mortgage 8 months ago
my cc are 1 year 1k and 11 months 5k respectively. I have no lates, no collections, no negative items other than time of accounts. On my credit. the main reason is that my father always said credit was bad and so i never had credit other than some at the local bank. but they bank never reported under my name because my father cosigned it.
Message Edited by sealdog on 03-09-2008 01:39 PM