Hi! I've been lurking on these forums for a while and finally decided to join. I've been working quite hard on my husbands and I's credit for the past few months and while I've been able to help both of us quite a bit any more tips would be great!
A little back story about our credit...
My husbands parents have been adding his as a user to most of their credit cards for years now. The only problem is his mom loves to open and close credit cards, they've always been in good standing, paid in full and all had high credit limits. (10-20k) My husbands score has always been over 740's until we started applying for credit and had some major financial things come up over the past few years. His oldest account is 25 years old with average account age being 8. Experian is saying age of accounts is a negative against him. His current score is 687. However up until a few weeks ago we were using about 65% of our $88,000 credit limit...thanks to getting married and going through infertility treatments. In the past few weeks I've been able to pay off over $35,000 in debit thanks to a huge promotion at work and should be able to do another 10-15k or so by June. I'm wondering how long it will take to update with the credit reports? I see a select few of the credit cards are showing lower balances but the score its self hasn't changed. We don't need to buy anything major anytime soon, just working on getting his score back up! I'm interested in applying for the amex blue cash rewards card for 6% back on groceries, but want to wait until we get things back under control here. My husband now makes over 6 figures and we pay $0 for housing, so we have a bit to work with, just trying to figure out the best way!
As far as my credit goes, I don't work. I do however receive a monthly income from a trust fund. I have one credit card with chase with a $1,500 balance. And I've been slowly adding myself as an auth user to some of our credit cards. That alone has shot my credit up quite a bit, 60 points in the past month. However its still in the lower mid 600's. I have an old account in collection's that was paid and closed. It looks like it will fall off my credit in early 2017. Not sure what else I can do on my end.
A few side note questions-
How bad is it to have closed credit cards? Could this be greatly affecting his score? Also do the closed cards credit limits show in your total available credit?
I've asked for a credit increase on one of our cards (Discover) and was granted $1,500. Should I wait until all the other cards update before asking for others?
We have one $30,000 (now $19,000) car loan with a 2.8 interest rate, would it be beneficial to pay that off or should we keep it for the time being seeing how that's our only instalment loan?
And of course, how often do they change the score? Mine seemed to change really fast but my husbands has been the same for a few months now.
Sorry for the long post!
