@sarge12 wrote:
BBS, we would all be rich if we could answer for sure why credit card issuers chose a time when the debtor finally started paying down debt to balance chase. I just know from these forums that it happens, I never have known why. Balance chasing is very cruel if the person is paying down the debt to raise their scores for mortgage approvals or something like that. How many times have we seen someone upset because they paid a lot of debt down and their scores drop because of balance chasing.
Quite often the balance chasing (or any AA, really) can come because of other elevated risk to one's credit profile outside of the account in question. I'm a good example of that. Before my rebuild when I have negative information introduced to my file from other accounts, I received AA on a 15 year old CC that I had never been late on a single time. The creditor saw new negative information elsewhere on my credit report and risk assessment wise perhaps felt they could be next in line and took action to protect themselves from that. It is what it is.
I'm super conservative when it comes to debt, so my opinion on that would be that if someone is preparing for a mortgage they should be debt-free and not just merely paying down debt in order to grab a few points for approval. If someone is struggling / can't pay off current CC debt (that's likely minor relative to what mortgage debt would be) they probably aren't in a healthy place to be looking toward pulling the trigger on a mortgage.
I understand that recently it has been determined that closed accounts with a balance don't adversely impact Fico scores, where the previous concensus on it was that they were viewed as a maxed out account. That being said, if someone was being balance chased and it was hurting their scores significantly they could just close the account.
