Hi Devin. Your FICO score consists of five categories, each of which has several factors. But overwhelmingly the two biggest categories are Payment History and Amounts Owed. Happily they are both categories you can control.
I believe you have said that you have a perfect Payment History. That means that you have no lates, missed payments, charged off accounts, liens, collections, or anything like that anywhere on your credit reports. Is that right?
The other category (Amounts Owed) is how much you owe on your various debts. The overwhelming driver here is credit card debt. Trying to pay down other kinds of debt (mortgages, car loans, etc.) is much less important. So what you want to do is pay off your credit card debt as fast as you can -- the fact that you have a nearly maxxed out card is harming your score. It's also possible that the financing you are getting through Wells Fargo (you mentioned work being done of the windows in your home) is being classified on your credit reports as "revolving" debt. Could you look and see?
If the Wells Fargo home improvement account is classified as revolving, then it's being treated by FICO as a credit card. In that case you want to pay it off too (no rush, but as soon as you feel you can). If it is classified as an installment loan, however, I would just steadily make the regular monthly payment on it for the life of the loan. One last thing to make sure of is that this account is not being classified as a "finance company" account. That's harmful to your score, but Wells Fargo shouldn't be being classified as such.
Once you get all your revolving debt paid off (that includes credit cards) your score will be much higher.
How many credit cards do you have total? Once you get all your cards paid off, there's no problem with you still using them, but it's in your interest to pay the balance in full each month (so that you pay no interest) and to keep the total amount that the cards report to the big three bureaus as a small percentage of your total credit limits. That's easy to do and we can tell you how to do it if you need help there.
