Need to improve from a 728 to a 740 to qualify for 15% down payment loan

[Anonymous]

Here is a trick that works and will give you a quick bump 10-15 days. If you have a friend or fmaily member that has a perfect pay history, $6K or highler limit on it with a 22% or less balance, but should have a small one. Have them add you as an authorized user, all the credit ranking for that card will instantly transfer to you, after you are done get removed, should give you the little bump you need.

[Anonymous]

The stimulator is really accurate. My husband and I just purchased our first home and I needed my score to increase by 40 points. The stimulator said if I paid off a balance on one of my credit cards $518 my score would increase 58 points. Our loan officer told me the same thing. They use something called rapid rescore. Well once I paid it off and they did the rapid rescore my score increased a little over 50 points and we were approved for our loan. We closed on Wednesday of last week. 

[jgriffin]

Hi.
I don't know all the details or if my comment will help but here goes.
I have just now gotten my score to 660. Lot of medical debt in my early 20s.
Once it got to 620 I was able to be approved for an FHA loan.
I just closed on my loan a couple months ago.
I borrowed 260k. With FHA you only need to put 3.5% down. My interest rate is 3.5% 30 year fixed.

260k where I live is a very very nice home. There are FHA limits in each state. Perhaps that would work for you

God bless and good luck. This was my first home and I never thought the day would come. I cannot describe the feeling.

[Anonymous]

An alternative to waiting until your score is acceptable to BOA is to consider a portfolio loan through a reputable mortgage company, bank or credit union. They offer loans at a slightly higher rate however they will usually consider a 10% down payment and there is usually no mortgage insurance. As a victim of identity theft I procured a portfolio loan at just under 6% and was able to covert it to a conventional mortgage a year later with the best rate available at the time. Be prepared to tell your story and explain your current financial situation in detail.

[Bug101]

I know when we were in the process of buying a house and wanted to qualify for a conv loan we came on these forums and leanred some gret tricks that really worked. We went from like 640 to like 720 in just a few months.

We played the credit card game. We hated it because it was a pain in the rear end but it worked. We actually did it with just 1 ($300) credit card at the time. We would use the min each month around 7-9% and then pay it off makig sure it was paid off on tie before being charged interest but in the window of being used for reporting. Paid all bills on time as usual which was really just our student loan and car payment. And every month our FICO went up. And within  like 3-4 months our scores jumped to 700-735 with our middle being the 720 we needed.

We closed on our house last June with a conventional loan and only had to put down 5%. We actually did  rehab loan on top of it and still only paid 5.12% interest with no points.  Had we not taken the rehab loan we would have gotten a 4%. BTW our loan was $236K and the house is now worth over $500K.

My point here is that the credit card game does work if you can handle it it as it is work. In fact, after we closed on the house we went ahead and opened some credit cards all with no interest for 13-18 months (4 total). We decided to use them for new appliances and otehr stuff for the house. We knw our credit would take a hit but for the time we did nto need to worry. Well our credit took a HUGE hit.  We went down to 628 and 640 between the 3. Well after almost maxed them out (about 15K) we just started paying them off and not use them. As the balances went down our scores stayed exactly same for the last 6+ months, NO movement at all. Our balances were still considered too high. Then a light bulb went off in my head about 2 months ago.

I decided to use a little but pay off more than I spent. Playing the credit card game again. Our balances are still considered too high but guess what. In the last two months, our scores have JUMPED over 45 points on all of them and some around 50 points. We do plan to pay them all off again but not until the free interest runs out. We knew our scores would jump back up when paid off but I decided to start givng it a boost now and it is working. we figure the pay offs will only make them go up even further. We seen a 33 point jump in just 1 month on EQ8 even with high blances just for using our credit cards.

So the REAL trick to FICO score jumps is USING yours credit cards but keeping the balances low to zero.  Do not go months without using them even just a little, no matter how much your balances are.

[Anonymous]

You can increase your FICO score pretty quickly by doing these next three steps get ahold of all three of your credit bureau reports and look at them, most the time 99 percent of the time there are errors in there, from collections , late payments, wrong amount $$ , your name could be wrong erroneous and the list goes on, the bottom line is by law it has to be to the point without error and if they still failed to do the correction within a certain amount of time they must remove it from your credit and that my friend means added points.. .. I removed 6000 dollars worth of derogatory information within the year, you you should be able to get point you want within 30 days , hope this helps  Johnny

[Anonymous]

Correction 16000 dollars worth of derogatory information.

[Ruble]

The fastest way is to pay more amount (If you can payoff great,.) on your credit card. Unfortunately my advice is coming a bit late if you applying for a mortage in July. It will talke companies utp 30 days to update your good behavior to credit reporting agencies. If you are monitoring your credit report, find how when each of your credit card companies update thier info. Another thing that you could do to increase 4-6 points is to use any/all credit card that you have not been using for a long time and pay it off immediately. This might sound strange but it works.

[Revelate]

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@Bug101 wrote:

I know when we were in the process of buying a house and wanted to qualify for a conv loan we came on these forums and leanred some gret tricks that really worked. We went from like 640 to like 720 in just a few months.

We played the credit card game. We hated it because it was a pain in the rear end but it worked. We actually did it with just 1 ($300) credit card at the time. We would use the min each month around 7-9% and then pay it off makig sure it was paid off on tie before being charged interest but in the window of being used for reporting. Paid all bills on time as usual which was really just our student loan and car payment. And every month our FICO went up. And within  like 3-4 months our scores jumped to 700-735 with our middle being the 720 we needed.

We closed on our house last June with a conventional loan and only had to put down 5%. We actually did  rehab loan on top of it and still only paid 5.12% interest with no points.  Had we not taken the rehab loan we would have gotten a 4%. BTW our loan was $236K and the house is now worth over $500K.

My point here is that the credit card game does work if you can handle it it as it is work. In fact, after we closed on the house we went ahead and opened some credit cards all with no interest for 13-18 months (4 total). We decided to use them for new appliances and otehr stuff for the house. We knw our credit would take a hit but for the time we did nto need to worry. Well our credit took a HUGE hit.  We went down to 628 and 640 between the 3. Well after almost maxed them out (about 15K) we just started paying them off and not use them. As the balances went down our scores stayed exactly same for the last 6+ months, NO movement at all. Our balances were still considered too high. Then a light bulb went off in my head about 2 months ago.

I decided to use a little but pay off more than I spent. Playing the credit card game again. Our balances are still considered too high but guess what. In the last two months, our scores have JUMPED over 45 points on all of them and some around 50 points. We do plan to pay them all off again but not until the free interest runs out. We knew our scores would jump back up when paid off but I decided to start givng it a boost now and it is working. we figure the pay offs will only make them go up even further. We seen a 33 point jump in just 1 month on EQ8 even with high blances just for using our credit cards.

So the REAL trick to FICO score jumps is USING yours credit cards but keeping the balances low to zero.  Do not go months without using them even just a little, no matter how much your balances are.

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The bulk if not entirety of the revolving utilization calculation is instant in time.  Heard of one example in many years that was different.  Your score changes likely came from simply reducing below some thresholds rather than some historical payment history event.

As long as the tradeline continues to report at $0, it's fine; there are some cards (Hi Synchrony Bank!) which don't, and after six months or whatever they may be discounted by the FICO algorithm but this isn't normal.

From a Bank of America tradeline:

Last Reported

Jun 12, 2015

My last statement balance was January on it, and it's been flatline $0 since then.  I will be addressing that once my current statement closes just to keep it active since I removed the recurring payment I had on it to prep for a mortgage, but there's no need for me to report a balance to keep it scoring positively for me.