Wish I had better news for you but there's no quick fix other than getting that 60 day late airstruck somehow... heck nuke the whole tradeline if that's available, you don't care currently you just need it gone as that's going to limit your scores for a while and is the elephant in the living room when it comes to FICO scoring.
From the sounds of it you might be able to tweak your revolving utilization better (grab a report and post current balance / current tradeline if you'd like assistance with that), but that doesn't typically produce 20 points when you're already in pretty good shape to begin with on that calculation. I'd continue hammering on that student loan issue and likely post over in the Rebuilding forum too for possibly resolving that.
@Anonymous wrote:Thank you both for the replies. It is appreciated.
Unfortunately Marlena my GF does not have the salary to qualify on her own while allowing us to buy a decent home (living in Maryland where the homes are priced ridiculously).
Revelate,
Do you have a link or any information on how to go about removing a tradeline? I have several other student loans so I believe if I was to remove the one with the late payments it would only improve my credit even though I am losing a tradeline. The only response I receive to my GW letters is that they are required to report all information, so not sure how open they would be to removing the tradeline completely :-/
Does anyone know how being an authorized user on a CC affects your mortgage status? Will a bank deny you if they see this or just factor that account out of your credit report? I know Navy Federal uses your standard mortgage score versions (posted in the sticky thread in these forums) so I am not sure how these versions reflect authorized user data.
Won't deny you for having an AU, might ask you to remove it worst case but that's becoming really rare from some reports here. I don't think anyone really cares anymore if you can jump through the rest of the hoops required to get a mortgage, if you pass the credit score sniff test you'll be OK is my read of the situation. Might try to factor it out but that's sort of impossible and would be all sorts of sticky, with your own credit history I don't think anyone would even blink. I would suggest both are irrelevant if you're trying to clear a FICO hurdle.
AU in general only helps if:
1) It changes your utilization calculation in a good way (high limit, $0 balance ideal)
2) It improves your AAOA by being longer than your other tradelines (or the average of them to be specific, earlier open date the better) - not sure that's the case here.
3) Of course, needs to be a pristine tradeline
If you think it'll help in your situation meeting those critera, I'd add it personally. AU's will be counted under all of the mortgage trifecta so there's no problem on that count.
Regarding addressing the 60 day late, hit the Rebuilding forum as the experts live there and I'm not one of them on that subject; sometimes OC's have been known to just whack the whole tradeline, what I was trying to get across was any way you can get that off, just take it, even if it comes up with a compromise of they'll delete the account record if you stop bothering them rather than just nullifying the lates.