Trying to boost my score quickly to get a better mortgage rate

[Anonymous]

Hi. I am buying a house and my credit is 689. I paid off all my bills already and I don't know how else to raise my credit score to get a better mortgage rate. I would like to raise it to 720. It might not happen in 2 months but do you have any advice to give on how to raise my credit score?

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Congrats on paying off all of your bills!

Did you leave at least one of your revolving credit cards with a balance (less than 9% utilization)?  Having one credit card report with a balance is better than having them all with zero balances.

Without knowing all the specifics, another way you may be able to raise your score is if you have accounts with late payments that the creditor would be willing to delete. 

[Anonymous]

Yes, I have one credit card that I use to show activity. 

How do I ask creditors to delete late payments?

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the congrats, by the way =)

[MBOhio2]

creditMB - I would recommend listing all of the negative information currently on your CR - late payments, collections, etc. Also, are you using a credit monitoring service? If so, which one? If you're using a real FICO one, like Score Watch here, it will also tell you what factors are hurting your score. Once we see exactly what is hurting your score, then we can advise on how to address them!

[Anonymous]

It says that I have 2 accounts that were delinquent in the past 2 years. The credit cards were 0 balance but because I didn't realize that they charged me annual fees adn i didn't check my account, I was late in paying them. 

[Anonymous]

And I had an old credit card that was a charge off  =(

I don't know how to fix those if it happened 5 years ago.

[Anonymous]

If the credit cards were only late because of the annual fee, you may be able to get the company to remove the late payments.  I would try to call them first, and if that doesn't work, then try a GW letter.

[MBOhio2]

For the lates that were the result of unpaid fees, I would definitely write GW letters to the creditor - there are GW letter templates over on the Rebuilding board and I think that if you clearly explain how the lates occurred (no balance, just fees), you have a good shot of them working with you to delete the lates.

For the chargoff, is there still a balance owed or have you since paid it off? If you still owe, you might try a PFD and just get the account deleted altogether. If you don't owe, again, I would try GW letters.