How to increase your credit score to buy a house
So while you’re working on your credit score, what you also need to be working on is paying that debt down and as you pay the debt down, that will help your score increase.
And why are we talking about debt? Let me go there. Let me talk about what debt really plays a part of your credit score issue. Revolving credit, revolving credit. I’m talking about credit cards. I’m talking about store cards. I’m talking about your gas cards. This is the type of stuff I’m talking about.
This is what affects your credit score more than anything. Does your car loan affect your credit score? Yes, but not as much as revolving credit. OK, let’s just to be quite honest. Do your student loans affect your credit score? Yes, but not as much as your revolving credit.
I’m going to tell y’all a little something that I did that bumped my score up like 70 points. OK, you know how I don’t know about you, but before I paid off all my debt earlier this year, I had several different cards, different stuff, and I was always getting these advertisements in the mail about consolidate your debt.
I’ll put a link down below to whichever one I did. But let me say this. So I changed my revolving debt to installment debt and it boosted my score 70 points. Listen, because all these credit cards, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, you know, you got several this one and several of that one.
I took all of those into an installment loan. So let’s say they give you $30,000 thousand dollars and you pay off all your revolving debt and now you have one installment loan. Your utilization just shot up, just shot down, rather, from maybe 80 percent utilization to zero.
So you know what’s going to happen? Your credit score is going to go up. If you have the opportunity to consolidate your debt, excuse me, and change it from revolving. And make it installment. That will greatly, greatly increase your credit score simply because you’re going to take your utilization and the utilization, they’re only looking at revolving debt, not installment loans, but revolving debt.
It worked for me, and I think I’m with Lending Club. It may be Lending Club I’m going to have to look, but anyway, because I only kept it six months and then I paid it off.
See what I’m saying? So I got that boost. I got that boost from when I paid off all those revolving accounts – all those credit cards, and so now I look, oh, I’m beautiful on paper. And in fact, that payment on an that installment loan was less than the minimum payments on all of my revolving debt, all of my credit cards. So it’s a win win. So that’s one thing that you may want to look at when you start in the process of wanting to try to qualify for a mortgage – what type of debt are you carrying? If you’re carrying a lot of revolving debt, try to move that to installment debt.
It will make a big impact and that will help you with your debt to income when it comes time to qualify for a loan.
If you need help with obtaining a mortgage or buying a home here in the Nashville area, I would be glad to help you. Please feel free to give me a call at 615-554-0832.
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