Hi, Greg, welcome to the forums, and sorry to hear about your battles.
There's nothing wrong with having 11 acounts; the problem is having them all report balances. FICO scoring is done off the balances that are reported by your creditors. For credit cards, this is almost always the figure reported on your statement (note the "almost".)
What you need to do is pay down/off most of your cards
before they report. As above, for most cards, this is on the statement date, which is NOT the same as the due date. The statement date is the date that shows on the mailed or online version of your statement. This is also called the post date or the drop date.
First count up how many open accounts you have that report to the CRA's, including mortgages and loans. For instance, in my case, I have a mortgage, a HELOC, a student loan, and 5 credit cards, so I have a total of 8 open accounts. Divide this number by 2. Your scores will be optimized by having half or fewer accounts report balances. Since by definition, all open loans report balances, you are reduced to controlling how many CC's can report a balance. Subtract half the number of open accounts minus the number of loans, and now you know how many CC's you can let report. In my case, that would be 4 (one-half of 8 open accounts) minus 3 loans = 1 CC that can report.
Statement dates generally wander around 2-3 days before or after the previous month's statement, so go online 4 or 5 days before your statements posted the previous month, and pay most of them off. Leave however many cards that are OK to have balances with less than 10% of their individual credit limits. In other words, on a card with a $1K CL, pay it down to $90 or less, which is 9% or less.
If your eyes have completely crossed by now, let's say that you subtracted your number of loans from your number of total open accounts, and you wind up with 8. That means that you can have a maximum of 4 CC's showing balances. PIF at least 4, and have the remaining report no more than 10% of each one's credit limit.
Hope that hasn't melted your brain as much as it did mine!
* Credit is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. * Who's the boss --you or your credit?
FICO's: EQ 781 - TU 793 - EX 779 (from PSECU) - Done credit hunting; having fun with credit gardening. - EQ 590 on 5/14/2007