My experience in one month

[Anonymous]

Hey guys and gals. On June 20th I got a 3B report with the following results. FICO Score 8, EQ 652 TU 646 EX 663. I then had a cousin with good credit add me to her Discover Card as a AU. Her limit is $12,000. I also got a personal loan from Lenmark for $6,000 and paid off all credit cards and one installment. I checked my 3B again today and got these numbers. Fico Score 8, EQ 722 TU 733 EX 721.  Of course these aren't the mortgage scores. Those are EQ 667 TU 695 EX 708. I'm hoping this will be enough to do a cash-out Re-fi on my home. Just wanted to share.

[HeavenOhio]

Congratulations on the score increases.

Are all of your cards currently reporting zero balances? If so, you may be leaving some points on the table. Once the grace periods have been reset, let one card report a small balance with the rest reporting zero. The caveat here is that I'm not sure how the AU card fits in. Someone with more expertise than I have can chime in on that.

[Anonymous]

I still have a small balance on a few cards.. Adding me as an AU gave me $12,000 more credit which lowered my utilization way down below 20% and boosted my scores.

[Anonymous]

All FICO models (but especially the mortgage models) respond best when all your cards except one are reporting $0.  In a perfect world, you'd like the AU card to always be $0, but that's not always doable since the account belongs to somebody else.  When did your cousin first open that card?

[Anonymous]

16 years ago and her balance is $2000 out of $12,000. I will be speaking to the loan officer Monday to determine if I am good enough to proceed with the loan.

[Anonymous]

Bear in mind that having a loan officer check your mortgage scores will involve a hard inquiry on all three bureaus.  This will lower your scores by a small amount (though the penalty will be delayed for 30 days).

If you were to pull your mortgage scores here at myFICO, you will incur no hard inquiry.

[HeavenOhio]

CGID, it looks like wesleypitman has already pulled mortgage scores.

wesleypitman, maybe at this point you can simply tell the loan officer your current mortgage scores and have a general discussion about where you're at. If you can bring along copies of your credit reports, that would be helpful too as the he or she is likely interested in information beyond your scores. If the loan officer thinks you're in good shape to proceed, then go ahead and take the pull. 

[Anonymous]

Duh!  I totally missed that.  Read too fast.  Thanks Heaven.

[Subexistence]

Is it possible to pull your mortgage scores on your own and show them to your lender so that your lender doesn't cause you too get a hardpull?

[Anonymous]

They'll want to do their own pull. I wish you could do that but I don't see that ever happening with them.