FICO scores

[kap]

760 and 777. Are these good or great? TiA

[Lew Zealand]

These are very good, probably as good as generally possible if you pay off your credit cards and don't have any student loans outstanding. There's still room for improvement if you have a mortgage, though as we're up to 851 & 853 after 5yrs of good payments.

[PeterB]

Good, not great

When I did mine, I also got a percentile. One curious thing was that the two agencies scores were a bit farther apart from each other than are yours.

Edit: Lew beat me to the post... interesting that he makes the comment about student loans, because I'm still seriously in debt with those and paying them off, so I must be doing better than I thought.

[dmann]

Very good scores- generally considered "A" rated although with the tightening credit situation, may be dropped to an A-/B+. You should be in good shape if you're looking for a loan.

DM

[dmann]

FWIW, I have a good amount of debt in addition to my mortgage (much to my chagrin!) but I am religious about my payments and always pay more than the minimum amount due. I am not even close to being maxed out on anything and have plenty of "room" on my HELOC. I also have a very long credit history and have never made a TON of money at my job. My student loans and my previous car loan were both paid off early.

When I bought my car last year, my score was 780. I offer the information above to show that your credit scores are based on many factors and aren't as cut and dried as income to debt ratios. Would probably make life easier if they were!

YMMV-
DM

[kap]

We both paid off my student loans, her credit cards, her car loan (mine is paid off when I bought it 20 years ago :-) and our mortgage (sold our home :-(. We have no debts at this point. And intent to be so for a while as we are now in a lease-to-renter situation. We have only one credit card in the amount of $5,000 (good enough.) We use it to make small purchases to increase our FICO scores and for emergencies, i.e. car repairs. We have tried to get a mortgage loan with our bank (we got two from two houses we owned. Always been in good standing.) but they declined because we don't have sufficient accumulated debts!

[Lew Zealand]

What kap said.

Our scores were much lower while applying for the mortgage loan as we had no credit card debt (always paid off), no student loan debt (yay cheap state school!), and no car loan (yay average 16 year old cars!) and we were in the mid 600s as we had no paid debt history.

It's better to have some debt and show that you're paying it off consistently. *That* gets you the high credit scores, hence our improvement in spite of having a giant mortgage debt.

[kap]

opps, I meant to say we are now a lease-to-BUY phrase.

[space-time]

I had 800+ score, then I got a Credit Card with zero interest and decided to keep some money in a savings account to earn some interest and keep using the card until the 0% interest expired about 18 months later. I paid more than minimum, but not a lot. for 3 month the balance went up and my score dropped to 760-780. I paid the balance immediately and since then I never carry a balance, and my score is 830-840 on average. FWIW: I don't have any debt, but also no mortgage.