changing mortage score quickly?

[Anonymous]

I am hoping for help from the mortgage gurus:

I am a point shy with Transunion of a good mortgage program, and was hoping to put an offer on a house in the next day or so until I was told I would not qualify.

Someone posted that when you pay your Chase credit cards off, they report it immediately, not waiting until the statement closing date. Not sure if that applies to other ccs. 

I owed four thousand dollars, have a much bigger available balance, and paid it off this morning, hoping to get even a one point bump. I called Chase and they confirmed that they report 0 balances as soon as it posts, usually the business day after or two,  instead of waiting for the statement close dates.

Do you have a sense for how quickly TU would update the balance due info? Basically, when can I run another report to see if my score went up the one point I need.

Thanks!

[NC_Mtg_Loaner]

Well, it's kind of an imperfect science---all this credit reporting is.

Now I am likely to get banned from the My Fico boards for saying that the "racket" (imo) that is the credit monitoring and credit scoring and credit rescoring business is fueled by the millions of folks like yourself who didn't learn how the magic scoring algorithms worked before you went shopping for a home loan, but it is what it is. 

Generally speaking however, your creditor is likely to report your updated balance once a month--typically around the 10th to the 15th although many can be different which is why many experts will say "your actual results may vary".    Of course you don't want to pay your account off in full  but want the utilization ratio to be <10% on your card but that should be enough to boost your score by next week.  Some lenders, when processing a loan, will conduct a rapid rescore for the low low price of about $49 per account per tradeline, but at my company we don't do it unless we are processing a loan file as I'd have no way of collecting said fee.

[Anonymous]

Personally I would give it a week, might not be until Friday of next week, though of course it could be sooner.

You should sign up for a free tool that gives you a daily update of your TU report.  WalletHub comes to mind.

PS.  After the Chase card reports $0, will that mean that all of the cards on your report will be at $0?  If so, that will in itself cause a scoring penalty.  FICO wants you to have at least one card at a psoitive balance.  One card is ideal in fact.

[carleyg]

You can ask your lender to do a rapid rescore. It's where you present your lender with proof of the changes and they can submit it to the credit bureaus. They can update your credit score overnight or within a couple of day.