Hi there,
I hope you don't mind but I broke your post into paragraphs which makes it much easier to read. A post consisting of a single, large block of words will often be passed over by readers and that might cause the loss of excellent advice or suggestions.
MarineVietVet, myFICO moderator
Thanks in advance to any and all for taking your time to share wisdom and advice with some rookies. My husband and I are currently rebuilding our credit after a job loss 7 years ago that almost ruined us. We got out of a debt consolidation program in late 2010 and are now in a position to save money to buy our first home. Our scores are rising as we recently had some old baddies fall off and we have completely paid off our credit cards this month after a long period of time with high utilization (we didn't realize until last month this was hurting us).
Only one card has reported since we paid them off, so we are hopeful we will get a nice bump in the next few weeks. Here are our current known scores: Me: TU 652 on 3/16, EX PLUS (FAKO) 629, EQ 607 3/15 DH: TU unknown, EX PLUS (FAKO) 591, EQ 628 on 3/15 According to the estimator tools on myFico and Experian, we should be in the 650 - 710 range within 3 months. We are certainly praying that is true. But now, after reading so many of the threads in the myFico forums, it seems like we can't really go by the scores we see at all because what the lenders pull are different?!?! The Experian score is a FAKO and there is nowhere we can buy the real one...The TU score uses an old model the lenders no longer use....
Even the mortgage person we are thinking of using (for an FHA loan) told us our scores may be higher when she pulls them because she excludes medical collections and those are the only 2 collection accounts we have ($250/each. More than 2 years old, didn't even know about them until we joined myFico last Month.) So how are we supposed to know when our midscore makes it safe to apply? Obviously we don't want to apply too early and risk an extra inquiry if we aren't ready. We would rather be sure or at least PRETTY sure our scores are good before we let her pull them.
Also, we are thinking of building a home with a 120-150 day build time. Do we have to have all our down payment and reserves in savings when we go to get pre-approved or can we continue to save that while the house is being constructed? The builder requires $3K down and we will have that plus another $3K saved by June. That's when we would like to start the build and then continue to save while they build the house, as the neighborhood we want to be in is running out of lots! We could save another 8-10K before closing as we are saving 2K a month now. Is that possible, or do we need it all upfront? Again, thanks for any advice!
