@Anonymous wrote:Hello all, this is my first post.
I am considering buying a home, I think home prices will bottom in the next 6 months to 3 years and would like to take advantage.
I thought my credit was great because credit karma is reporting a VantageScore 3.0 of 787, I now know credit karma scores are nearly meaningless.
My Fico 8 score is much lower, it varies between 711 and 723. How can I get my Fico into that 740 -799 range, ideally within a year. I’d like to maximize my bargaining power when negotiating interest rates with banks/credit unions. If that is unrealistic, what is a more reasonable time frame?
My credit overview:
1 hard inquiry
1 Open account
Discover credit card (opened 2006, credit limit 23,500)
8 Closed accounts
Chase (opened 2006, closed 2008 - not my card, I was added to parents account)
Citycard (opened 2006, closed 2014 - not my card, I was added to parents account)
Student Loan (opened 2006, closed 2015)
Auto loan (opened 2007, closed 2009)
Mortgage (opened 2011, closed 2016)
Carsons (opened 2013, closed 2013)
Macys (opened 2013, closed 2015)
JC Penny (opened 2013, closed 2016)
My utilization varies between 0 to 15%. (I pay off my single credit card every month but charges sometimes go up to $3,500 a month). I should point out, my wife opened her first credit card and we plan on charging that one now to get a welcome bonus. My discover will probably have no more than a $100 charged to it monthly and paid off in full.
I had two 30 day late payments on a joint mortgage (one in 1/2015 and another in 2/2016, bank will not stop reporting, I asked many a time).
How would you guys go about raising that 711 Fico score if you were in my situation?
1. I'm glad you realized that the Vantage scores are meaningless. But I hate to tell you: FICO 8 is also meaningless, in the mortgage context. The FICO mortgage scores are what you need to look at, and the lender will look at all 3 scores and go with the middle one. So if you want to know what your mortgage scores are you're going to need to pull a report on MyFICO.
2. In your case I wouldn't change anything. I would just keep the balance small on the credit card, and I would be mailing 'verification' letters to the credit bureau, in the hope that that might accelerate the negatives dropping off.
With 1 open credit account and low utilization not sure but the experts may be. You may already know but since you compared your CK scores to Fico just wanted to point out that it's your Fico mtg scores that matter, namely the middle one.
There's a big difference between six months and 3 years from a credit optimization perspective.
If you're trying to optimize for that entire range, then I'd take SJ's advice and just sit on my hands.
That said you should be higher than where you're at now with 30D lates from 2016 and earlier and I can't help but think that's from a limited number of open revolvers when talking FICO 8, but before doing anything else I'd look at my mortgage scores as those are flatly different in terms of how they look at accounts and specifically not penalizing as harshly for even 0 open revolvers.
It would not surprise me at all to find that you're already higher than those scores when talking the mortgage trifecta, and really you only need to get to 740, and even 720 absolutely doesn't suck for mortgage underwriting. That all said, there's no negotiation when talking conventional or FHA mortgages... only on jumbo loans and that has less to do with your credit score vs. what your assets are TBH.
