Tuscani - Please correct me if I'm wrong. I understood that if you paid off a lot of your debt with lump sum payments, you don't get an immediate big score boost. This is because people might use a income tax refund, inheritance, etc. to pay it off. While you do lower the amounts owed, it doesn't "prove" that you won't run up big balances again and fail to pay them. It helps to have a good payment history plus low util for some period of time AFTER the big payoff to see the best effect on your score. True?
Not really.. what your explaining falls more along the lines of paying off closed charged off debt\collections which rarely gives consumers the boost they are looking for or expecting.
Keeping debt\utilization low on CURRENT and OPEN accounts is just as important as payment history.
