How to bump up Experian for Mortgage

[CreditDunce]

GW letters shouldn't open a dispute.  You are requesting the lender voluntarily remove the TL from your credit report.   You are not disputing anything with the CRA's.  I would keep sending the GW letters!

This is a dumb question, but just to make sure you are leaving a couple dollar balance to report on one card right?   They are both not reporting $0 balance.  I am fairly sure you aren't but if both report a zero balance, it will hurt your credit score.

One other thing you might want to consider is if your SO has any good credit cards they could add you to as an AU.  Most CCC's will report the AU account with the full account history (Amex is an exception to this rule),   It is a way to add an aged account to your CRA.  However, it normally takes a few months before the AU account is reported.  You will also want to check with your mortgage lender to verify they allow AU accounts.

[Anonymous]

Thanks! I learned here about UTI -- so I fixed that!

Well Experian didn't go up but Equifax did!!! Finally. Woohoo.

Wow, that took tons of work and thanks to MyFico's help!!!

[Anonymous]

Revelate, I am in escrow (haven't gotten to UW yet). EXP is my middle score and it's 593. My high is TU at 622. We are going with a sub prime lender and doing a VA loan and it's being manually underwritten. But I would feel so much better with a mid score of 620 because that loan would be able to be re-sold and the lender would be more likely to do a final approval. Because we had already paid down our revolving debt to <10%, my LO noticed that my student loans (installment loans) were split into 4 loans. There were 2 of those 4 tradelines that had small(er) balances. He asked if I could pay down the smaller installment loans to at least <30% and we will proceed but if we needed to, he could pull a credit report early next month after those post and see if they will boost my score.

Everyone else always gives the same advice about paying debt - installment loans don't impact that much. But what you noted gives me hope. How many points did you get with Experian paying down your installment loan?  Since that's our middle score now I'm hoping for the best lol.

[Anonymous]

bmhill, for what it's worth, we switched LO to a much much better lender and she said she wants to avoid manual underwriting.

That thing that helped the most was getting the collection accounts deleted. Our student loans are still high.

Can you believe that Capital One sticking a stupid $59.00 annual fee on a card that hadn't been used in 3 years dropped our score over 30 points! They credited it back, it went back to 0 and boom! Score went up! That was what I learned here about UTI. The way the bureaus interpreted that was like 100% balance increase -- not good. Even though only $59.00 it had to go back to 0 and that was 100% balance decrease!

It's crazy but true.

[Revelate]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Revelate, I am in escrow (haven't gotten to UW yet). EXP is my middle score and it's 593. My high is TU at 622. We are going with a sub prime lender and doing a VA loan and it's being manually underwritten. But I would feel so much better with a mid score of 620 because that loan would be able to be re-sold and the lender would be more likely to do a final approval. Because we had already paid down our revolving debt to <10%, my LO noticed that my student loans (installment loans) were split into 4 loans. There were 2 of those 4 tradelines that had small(er) balances. He asked if I could pay down the smaller installment loans to at least <30% and we will proceed but if we needed to, he could pull a credit report early next month after those post and see if they will boost my score.

Everyone else always gives the same advice about paying debt - installment loans don't impact that much. But what you noted gives me hope. How many points did you get with Experian paying down your installment loan?  Since that's our middle score now I'm hoping for the best lol.

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I *think* it's aggregate and as such if your aggregate installment utilization is high you may not get anything.  We haven't gotten datapoints to isolate singular tradeline utilization out of several.

I got on the order of 13 points; it's a little off because I took an inquiry after my initial mortgage pulls came out of grace period, but basically I went 725 -> 728 -> 722 -> 732.

It's not earth shattering, are you certain there's no further tweaks on revolving utilization or in maybe getting a negative whacked?