Please help, I've been trying to get my FICO above the 700 mark for over a year and my FICO seems to plateau at 699. I have less than 30% utilizations on all cards, except Discover which I used to balance transfer since they offered me 0% interest until 2010. I'm in the market for a home and would like the best rate possible. My last slow pay was from 2/2006, 0 collections, and 0 public records. I have 6 cards: HSBC (from '06), Orchard Bank (from '06), SAMS club (for the gas discount), BOA, Chase, Discover and AMEX all from 2008. Paid off my student loans (from '97). Carrying one car note from American Honda Financial Services (also from '06). Since I chose to transfer my balances to Discover b/c of the 0% interest, my FICO has dropped to 676! I'm not even sure if I can get a mortgage now.
The new cards are temporarily holding you back - likely along with the inquiries generated by the applications. How utilized is the Discover card? And what is your total utilization? (sum of all revolving debt to sum of all available credit).
My guess is that your Discover balance is the biggest factor to your score and your late payment is the next biggest. I know the 0% offers are tempting, but I'm always afraid that if I do that, one of my cards will see the lowered FICO that results and raise my rates and/or lower my limits (which, of course, lowers the FICO and causes other cards to do the same thing, which lowers the FICO...) For the Discover card, you could try to call Discover and ask them to raise your credit limit and, if you can pay down the balance to get it below 50% utilization, that should help a bit. Below 30% would be even better, of course. For your late payment, sometimes if you dispute them or ask them nicely (pointing out what a loyal and faithful customer, etc. etc.) the banks will erase one or two late payments (e.g. your mail got lost during a move, storm, burglary, etc.). It's not a sure thing, but it can't hurt to ask. In any case, you should expect any change to take a month or two to come through so set your expectations accordingly.
jlynn and cbob are both right. You'll need a longer credit history and a credit utilization of under 30%, preferably less than 10%, if you want to climb above 700. There's not much you can do about the time factor, but the Discover card's balance is definitely hurting you. Paying down the balance as much as you possibly can and increasing the credit limits on all your cards will help quickly lower your utilization ratio. Most of the time the credit issuer will only do a "soft pull" of your credit to increase the available limit. Of course, they aren't exactly handing out a lot of credit line increases these days. It's worth a try though. You might get lucky.
Thank you for everyone's input Hi all, thank you so much for your input and the time you took to respond, it is VERY appreciated! My total utilization is sitting at 36%. I used the Discover for 1 balance transfer and bigger purchases (i.e. Xmas). It unfortunately is sitting at 80% utilization because of a lower CL and (yes, shame on me) I couldn't resist getting my boyfriend the electronics this year. I should get my total utilization down next month because I plan on paying off my BOA which carries a balance of approx. 696.00; should I apply half of that to my Discover instead? Oh! and I also forgot, I let my co-worker use my card for medical (she's a single mother and couldn't afford to miss anymore work) and she's making the payments on that every month, but as a single mother she's paying the minimum mo. payment every month until she gets back on her feet from her leave of absence. That card is also sitting at 75% utilization. As for the GW letter requesting the late be removed, is it still feasible to do that as it was on a student loan, and the account has since been paid? Again, I can't express enough gratitude for any and all input (previous ones included), I just joined this site yesterday and didn't think the responses would be this fast, useful, or considerate.
As I understand it, if ANY cards are over 50%, even if your combined utilization is low, that knocks the FICO down considerably. If you're looking to improve your FICO and have $700 to put towards your bills, you would get a bigger (although perhaps not as big as you need) boost by paying down the high utilization cards instead of paying off a low utilization card. Now there are other reasons why you would want to pay off an account, but don't expect paying off your BofA to boost your FICO much if you still have several cards with more than 50% utilization. As far as the card you lent to a co-worker, it might be better off for your relationship and your credit rating if you arranged some sort of payment schedule with your co-worker that was independent of the card terms so that she would start paying down the balance on a regular basis and then for you to pay off the account or pay it down faster to improve your credit rating faster. You could structure the payments such that they are low while she's on leave and then go up to some other amount once she returns to work. The point is to break the relationship to the card account. That was a very kind and generous act, but as long as that card (or any card) has higher than 50% or even higher than 30% usage, your credit rating will suffer and it could end up being the one thing that is standing between you and your new house.
Your total utilization isn't bad, but the two cards well above 50% utilization are really holding you back. I recommend you apply as much as possible towards paying down the balance on those two cards. Like ccbob said, if you can pay down the card faster and have your co-worker pay you back on a different schedule, that would be ideal. Also, others in this forum might have better insight on removing the late, but my understanding is that it will likely not be possible for a Federal Student loan that has since been paid. Sorry . We're glad you found Creditnet and have received some help thus far. Please do come back often, let us know how things are you are going with your problems, and help others as you learn more about the credit world.
Will definitely heed the advice! Thanks again everyone, it shedded some much needed light! I was planning on paying the BoA since it had the highest APR but since it's sitting at less than 15% utilization, I will apply all of it to the Discover which should put it at exactly 50% and gradually ebb it down from there. I am going to call HSBC since it's the oldest account and see if I can get a CLI (cross my fingers) to help the utilization there. Three years and they've yet to raise my limit so here's hoping karma is on my side; though, in their defense I've never requested they do so before. As an aside, I've visited other forums on this site and found that Freecreditreport.com has been raping me for credit monitoring. I cancelled that membership today and am now enrolled via my AMEX to credit secure! I was paying $79/yr plus $12.95/mo for just my EXP and an occasional $29.95 to view all three CBR's (d@mn those catchy jingles, marketing gets me every time ) I now only have to pay $11.95 for all three! I had to ask the CSR three times just to be sure! Had I found this site earlier it would have saved me $300.00+!!! This site and its members are a God-send! Will definitely be recommending the site to my friends who shared my irresponsible mis-spent youth...
You can actually do something to add to your overall age and spike your FICO's . . . I think we all know where this is going but, I just wanted to throw it out there.
Get someone to add you as an authorized user to an old revolving account; i.e., credit card. So long as it something like Chase, Bank of America, American Express, Discover, etc., it will reflect on your report and you will reap the benefit of the age. There are also a small number of reputable companies who *gasp* offer this as a service.
Well, I didn't want to say it since we're obviously spammers w/ 2k posts. Just sayin' . . . BTW, where did ole' Hegemoney run off too?
