I'm new to all this. I just strarted researching FICO and really had no ideal its the standard that banks are using now. Sorry if some of my jargon is off, but I will learn it. Currently my FICO score from my Mortage company report is 669/687/703. I want to get these up and before I start making large payments to these cards I wanted to post them here to find out the best approach. Alot of these card I'm a AU on my wife's accounts most. We have alot of zero balances, do we just leave those zero or put a small amount on them. I also have a 90 day late on a student loan that will come off in June of 2021 will that help at all? Here are my CC accounts.
JP Morgan Chase Bank BL 5636 CL 24000
Synchrony BL 0 CL 3500
Sywmc/Cbna Closed BL 0 CL 2001
USAA BL 229 CL 2000
National Tire and Battery BL 0 CL 950
American Express BL 10612 CL 11000 AU
CitiBank BL 3312 CL 9400 AU
TD Bank/Target BL 0 CL 3500 AU
jpmcb BL 0 CL 2500
The/Cbna BL 0 CL 6000 AU
Jpmcb BL 0 CL 8500
Citicards Cbna BL 5637 CL 9210
Syncb/Lumber Liquidators BL 0 CL 3500 AU
Syncb/Paypal BL 274 CL 5070
TD Rcs/Littman Jewel BL 0 CL 5700 AU
Navy Fed BL 3986 CL 5000
Discovery BL 17861 CL 20,000
Navy FCU BL 10538 CL 24000
Navy FCU BL 0 CL 5000
Navy FCU BL 0 CL 5000
Thanks in advance for any advice.
If your goal is to increase your 2/4/5 mortgage scores specifically, they like $0 balances and don't care whether your accounts are AUs or not. You would definitely want all of your accounts that are reporting $0 to continue to do so. To optimize, you would want to pay down the balances you have on all of your other cards and then let one of them report a small balance. If doing that isn't immediately financially feasible for you, I would pay off your smaller balances and pay down your highest % balances as much as you can to boost the score contribs from accounts w/ balance and util metrics.
In your other thread, you mention that two of your high-util cards are AUs. If you need a mortage score boost in the near future and the account owner isn't able or willing to pay them down, having yourself removed from them should help your score. If your score-building goal is more long-term and the owner of those accounts has a plan to pay them down, it might be fine to leave them on your report, esp if they're helping your account ages.
@Bogey1975 As mentioned up thread, tackle the small dollar amounts and zero them out.
When do you plan to apply for mortgage?
Who will be on the application, you alone or with DW? If with DW, you may want to evaluate who has the lower middle score to strategize your efforts.
What middle score are you trying to obtain?
What is your available budget to put towards the debt?
I would recommend reading the below from ABCD2199
The Truth about Credit Card Utilization
My 11 Rules to Credit Rebuilding
FICO Score: What to pay down first?
From Birdman7
General Scoring Primer and Version 8 Master Thread rev.5.17.20
@Bogey1975 wrote:I'm new to all this. I just strarted researching FICO and really had no ideal its the standard that banks are using now. Sorry if some of my jargon is off, but I will learn it. Currently my FICO score from my Mortage company report is 669/687/703. I want to get these up and before I start making large payments to these cards I wanted to post them here to find out the best approach. Alot of these card I'm a AU on my wife's accounts most. We have alot of zero balances, do we just leave those zero or put a small amount on them. I also have a 90 day late on a student loan that will come off in June of 2021 will that help at all? Here are my CC accounts.
JP Morgan Chase Bank BL 5636 CL 24000
Synchrony BL 0 CL 3500
Sywmc/Cbna Closed BL 0 CL 2001
USAA BL 229 CL 2000
National Tire and Battery BL 0 CL 950
American Express BL 10612 CL 11000 AU
CitiBank BL 3312 CL 9400 AU
TD Bank/Target BL 0 CL 3500 AU
jpmcb BL 0 CL 2500
The/Cbna BL 0 CL 6000 AU
Jpmcb BL 0 CL 8500
Citicards Cbna BL 5637 CL 9210
Syncb/Lumber Liquidators BL 0 CL 3500 AU
Syncb/Paypal BL 274 CL 5070
TD Rcs/Littman Jewel BL 0 CL 5700 AU
Navy Fed BL 3986 CL 5000
Discovery BL 17861 CL 20,000
Navy FCU BL 10538 CL 24000
Navy FCU BL 0 CL 5000
Navy FCU BL 0 CL 5000
Thanks in advance for any advice.
You want as many zero balances as possible, except you want at least one card to report a small balance.
The late falling off will help your scores a lot. You could send verification letters to the bureaus; that sometimes speeds it up.
I can either pay everything down to 0 without discover. Should I leave discover at 81% or get discovery down to 28% and leave some other balances around 10%? If I get Discover and Amex under 28% should I stay and AU on those?
@Bogey1975 wrote:I can either pay everything down to 0 without discover. Should I leave discover at 81% or get discovery down to 28% and leave some other balances around 10%? If I get Discover and Amex under 28% should I stay and AU on those?
IMHO you should try to get Discover down to 28%, then start zeroing out the others.
And it's fine for you to remove yourself from the AU cards, especially the ones with high utilization.
