Quote:
Originally Posted by Tadpole
I'm not sure credit scores are predictable after high, medium, and low. When I was nearing retirement I found a house I wanted in the town I now live in. Since my current house had not sold, I needed to temporarily take a mortgage at PenFed. I thought to have a really high credit score you needed to use a lot of credit and show yourself making payments on time. I do not use credit that much and had paid off my house and cars years prior. But my credit score was 840 and my husbands was 832. I can't imagine why the slight difference.
I have concluded that all the talk about how one gets high scores is just not correct. We had even recently been a part of that BoA indiscriminate slash of credit limits on cards and it didn't seem to hurt us to have this decrease our ratio.
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My own recent experience is that it may not hurt your credit score to not have revolving debt, but can still effect your availability of credit.
I own my home outright, and have not had any debt since paying it off 5 years ago (except for standard credit card purchases, which always get paid off each month).
Like you, I was buying another home, before selling the first one. I tried to get a HELOC on the existing place as a bridge loan. Should have been easy, I thought. The amount I wanted to borrow was ~30% LTV and less than a years gross income.
My credit score is 809. I got declined. Reason? 'Limited Credit Experience'. I can only guess they looked back 3 years or so, and saw that I had no significant debt in that time frame.
So I end up using a margin loan as a bridge....