My wife and I have conflicting credit scores.?

Question

my score is 550,i have never purchased anything in my name, Ihave no realestate on the report. or credit cards,late payments,or a car loan. My wifes score,is 629, we own our house paid cash,on our third durango through chrysler(never late in 6 years at 730.00amonth) 3 credit cards, 2 with 2000.00 limits, zero balances. 1 with 1000.00 limit, zero balance. sams card 1000.00 limit zero balance and 5 closed at our request never late local retail cards. cingular 4 years never late. now my question is, what is wrong with this picture? oh,i make around 45,000.00 yr. and credit report says we only use 2% of our available credit. when I go to build my final home in 2008, I'm going to be asking for a builders loan, and they say you score has to be high, or you'll need alot of money down. I'm going to sell my current house, but not untill my new one is finished. i don't think lenders are out to help us, do you great people have any answers that will help?? I HAVE TO GET THIS SCORE UP

i saying i need to raise her score. we only owe chrysler 15,000.00 I don't owe anyone else a dime. we always pay our cards off every month, we have nothing in collections or late shouldn't this 629 she got be higher whats yours??

Answer 1

First and foremost - DO NOT close your accounts to build your credit. This will certainly cause a problem. Credit scores work on a number of factors and a rather large part is your available credit. Anything over 60% usage hurts your score. If you close cards and only use 1, any debt you have will be a direct reflection of that one card's balance. If you have 3 cards at $1000 a piece and have $700 in debt, your ratio is 23%. If you close the other 2, it goes to 65% for the same balance. The ONLY reason to close inactive accounts is to avoid fraud down the road. Several scams involving credit cards originate by taking small hits on your card to see if you are paying attention. If you fail to act, they start in on the big stuff. If you have accounts you never use, you may overlook the small initial hits.

Now, that aside, I am not 100% sure why your score (for either of you) would be that low. Typically the history you gave me would net a score above 680. What I would suggest is that you get a full copy of your report to see what is the real answer. You may have a judgment, collection, or "slow pays" that you may have never noticed. You can get a full, easily read report at www.annualcreditreport.com. This is not one of those junk sites that makes you pay $35 later. LEGALLY you are entitled to 1 free report per year. This site is set up by the bureaus to do this. You have to pay to see your score, but you can get the report for free. The score is worthless without context, so go their first. Hope this helps!

Answer 2

The person who said that you have to many credit cards and suggest closing even more cards is incorrect.

The reason that her scores are not higher could be from many different factors.

I do suspect the leading cause of her lower score could be the 5 accounts that were closed, if they were closed within the last 6 months to a year. If they were all closed at the same time or near the same time period. (more than one card was closed within a 6 month period)
Closing an account will usually always drop scores, closing more than one at the same time, or near the same time, will definately drop scores.

A person should "never" close accounts within 6 months to a year of making a major purchase - home, car, etc.

If you are not planning on applying for the financing to build your home for more than a year since those cards were closed, her scores may rebound by that time.

If you are planning on applying for financing before that time, and the closure of the cards was fairly recent, she might contact a few, or all, of the card companies and request that they re-open the accounts - just make sure that she demands they "do not" pull a hard inquiry to re-open them.

Without knowing more details, other reasons that her scores may be low could be --
She may have a short credit history -7 to 10 years or less.
If some/all of the cards that were closed were among her oldest accounts.
I wouldn't say that she would have to use her cards on a regular monthly basis, but she should use them at least once every 4 to 6 months. She would not have to charge much, just enough to keep the cards on the active list. Something like a tank of gas or a cup of coffee at Starbucks, etc.
It could also be if one or more of her cards do not report the credit limit but only the high balance (like Cap One does) and she has not used the card(s) for large purchases.
If her scores came from another company other than myFico, those scores could be lower than the true Fico scores.

There are so many factors why her scores are where they are.
I just listed few things that could be the reason.

Answer 3

The problem here, believe it or not, is that you have too much credit and not enough debt. This is hurting your score.

To build your score higher you need to have around a 25% debt ratio on your credit cards. Once you have spent 25% of your available balance, pay twice the amount of your minimum payment and then bring your debt ratio back to 25%. Pay twice your minimum payment and then bring your debt ratio back to 25%- get the picture.

This will increase your score by at least 100 points

- I just read some other advise- what ever you do- do NOT close any of your accounts. This is the worst thing that you can do, especially when applying for a home loan. Today most mortgage lenders want to see you have a minimum of 4 tradelines open

- UPDATE - the bank is going to borrow the money to the primary borrower and use the primary borrowers credit score- that is the person who earns more money between you and your wife. If your name is not on any of the credit cards, you have till the end of the month to put your name on the cards. After that, there will be no more piggybacking credit scores onto other peoples credit cards. Due to a new credit policy, piggybacking will no longer be effective.

Answer 4

Use your credit card for stuff like gas or groceries, but then pay it off RIGHT away. It'll boost up your score. Keep up with any payments that you do have and make sure that you don't owe any medical debts. Closing the credit cards (even on your request) doesn't help with the credit score unless you have too much credit already given to you (which it sounds like you don't.) It helps to keep the cards that you've used but paid off.

Answer 5

First of all--you have 3 credit cards open, all with zero balances. That's WAY too many credits accounts to have open.

You want to have as few accounts open as possible. Have one credit card and the Sam's card--not all four.

The best thing I can suggest is to just work on paying off the car loan. That's the best thing you can do. Closing accounts is going to probably help you as well.

Plus remember that you and your wife will NOT have the same credit score. Plus you never mentioned what you job was--in some careers, such as real estate, credit scores will sink to become nothing.

Another thing to remember is that you paid off your house, which is great but that's going to be a GOOD debt. Mortgage is a debt that is okay, but car financing and credit card debt is BAD.

Talk to a lender about this.

Answer 6

Hot Carl is right you don't owe enough sadly ...start using those cards and pay on them have a balance and pay it in double payments.Like he said don't close any of those cards.You could always go talk to a financial adviser as well

Answer 7

if all the credit cards are in your wife's name, try having her add your name to it. Then they would go on your credit too. I've heard that really helps.