improving credit

[Anonymous]

I have been working on improving my credit for the past couple of years. I had a below 500 credit score when I started. I had to pay off a medical collection and bring my student loans current which were at the time quite a bit past due (by quite a bit I mean 6 months). Since then I have been current on all accounts I have an auto loan that I have never been late on and 2 major credit cards one that has currently only about 10% available credit and the other that has about 75% available credit. I also have 2 student loans that have been current for the last 2 years. I checked my score about a year ago and had improved my score to about 660, an increase that I was happy with, I just pulled my credit tonight and my score has hardly moved. Would consolidating my student loans into a new single loan help or hurt my credit?

[Anonymous]

Consolidating SLs shouldn't do too much either way to your score. What will give you a gigundo boost is paying down both CCs to under 10% util.

[Anonymous]

Sloshing money around various accounts will seldom help your FICO score.

The exception to this is getting an installment loan to pay down high utilization on CC accounts that are otherwise in good standing save for 60% or higher utilization. If you can get a loan that reduces your CC uti from, say 65% to 20%, do it.