more importantly is does the NEW card number show the original open date or teh date that you got the new card? for example, i had my wallet stolen several years ago. i reported all my cards stolen and got new ones. Discover and First USA both reported the old numbers as lost/stolen and teh new ones with a open date of when i got the cards. this decreased my FICO instatnly because i lost several YEARS of age on my TL. if you wish to see you current score, the ONLY place to get the real score is to go to MYFICO.com and pay for it. remember, if it does not SPECIFICALLY say this is a FICO score, then it is an inhouse score for whatever service you are using and may differ greatly to teh good or to the bad from you rreal scores that lenders look at.

I think a score of 640 with a minimum of a 20% down payment would qualify you for a conventional/conforming loan. Read somewhere some lenders might consider a score of 600 with an even bigger down payment. But don't quote me on that. Quick fixes to the FICO score isn't the wisest of ideas - it takes a bit of time. Things fade from the report over time, but paying off a collection won't remove it from the report for seven years. Best path to take is pay bills on time. Use a credit card wisely keeping any balance low. Don't shuffle credit cards around shopping for a lower interest rate. Don't close out unused credit cards and don't open up any new ones. PS, the highest FICO score is 850 - there is another calculator (VantageScore??) which goes up to 990, I think... but a whopping big looking score on Vantage isn't any better a rating to a lender than what you'd see with the commonly used FICO scoring.

Knowledge is power. They don't teach much about money management in school. Many didn't learn much about it at home - as children grow, it seems to me wise to have them gain in-depth knowledge, incrementally, of how the family's financial system works. When I was a kid, we got a weekly allowance, that grew as we grew, and we were epected to buy our clothes for school and cover school expenses (which were smaller than currently). World War II began in 1939 when I was 10, the farmhands went off to war and what Dad and this 10 year old, plus a couple smaller, got done - got done: the rest ... didn't. We had lots of work in summer and Dad paid us for that, which helped us buy the things that we needed to return to school and there was an increase in our allowance, to compensate for the increased chores, year-round. We were encouraged to save some - I had a bank account when I was too young to see over the counter ... and we were expected to pay at Sunday School, church-based youth group, etc. from our allowance. In case of dire emergency, we could borrow against future allowance from Dad, which entailed some questions as to whether we might have foreseen the problem, and, even if not been able to have seen it coming, to cover the cost from savings, had we chosen to have some/(any?). And we learned early the discipline of getting along for a while on less after we'd borrowed, for Dad expected us to repay those loans earlier rather than later. Good training as to management of debt ... which would be helpful much later, when "credit" cards appeared on the scene: we knew that they didn't offer "free money". When we use someone else's money - usually they require some compensation (and, sometimes ... way too much: have you investigated the economics of the recently-arrived "payday loan" game?)! After one has stepped into a bear trap - it's a bit late to wish that one had chosen where to put one's feet more carefully! Looks as though Microsoft has cut some of our opportunity for learning about one portion of personal financial management a bit short, also. ole joyful P.S. When one guy, regardless of how central a position he holds in our economy, can become the richest man in the world in half of a generation ... ... do you figure that possibly sometimes people get overcompensated for some innovative discovery that they have made (usually, along with a number of others)? That just possibly our free-market-based economy could stand some tweaking? And the Bolsheviks and the Commuist systems aren't any better - look at all of the newly-minted millionaires ... nay, billionaires ... that have been appearing in Russia and China as their system matures (goes to seed?). And during their heyday, they arranged things so that not too many became part of the core system - didn't want to spread the largesse around too much - or it'd get too thin for each! o j

Although Bry911 states scores over 800 you should just relax with a drop the 5 point drop I received did effect the cost of my car and house insurance. Car insurance uses a different score and credit pulls typically don't change the score. Home insurance can change because of credit pulls but it is a fairly minor change. In either situation an 800 FICO without a lot of credit card debt as the OP stated will return insurance scores close to 950, anything above an 800 is going to keep you in the lowest rate. In fact, it is hard to have a bad insurance pull with credit above a 720. Bry mentioned a 25 pt drop but I did not see that number in any of the remaining posts. A hard pull drops your credit between 2 and 4 points per pull for 1 year with old pulls sometimes having a diminished effect. The higher and lower your score the higher the effect on your credit, additionally if you have old pulls but no recent pulls that doesn't hurt your score as much as old pulls plus recent pulls. In other words consistently pulling your credit hurts more than the same number of pulls at one time then a long break. It is impossible to accurately calculate the effect of a monthly hard pull but we can guess that at an 800+ credit score it is somewhere between 20 and 30 points.