Timing between loans and applying for a new credit card
There were several areas where the mortgage and car loan have affected your credit.  The mortgage had the following impacts, The car loan (purchased shortly after the house) had the following impacts, You did not mention your payment history, but since you had an 800 prior to the house purchase, we can assume that your payment history is current (nothing late). You did not mention your credit utilization, but you want to keep your utilization low (various experts suggest 10%, 20% and 30% as thresholds).  The down payment on the house likely drained your available funds, and replacing the car may have also put stress on your funds.  And when you buy a house, often there are additional expenses that further strain budgets. My guess is that your utilization percentage has increased.  My suggestion would be to reduce your utilization ratio on your revolving accounts.  And since you have plenty of credit lines, you might want to payoff the car. Your Chase card has a good age, which helps with age of credit, and though you will find experts that say you should only have 2-4 revolving accounts (credit cards), other experience shows that having accounts with age on them is a good thing.  And having a larger number of accounts does not cause problems (unless you have higher utilization or you miss payments). You did not mention whether the Chase card has any fees or expenses, as that would be a reason to either negotiate with Chase to reduce or eliminate the fees, or to cancel the card. Have you checked your credit report for errors?  You can get a free report from each of the three bureaus once per year.
Utilization is near real-time. What that means is that what is reported is what is taken in terms of debt-to-income (DTI) ratios. When a mortgage broker pulls your credit, they will pull the latest balances with the minimum payments. This is what is taken to determine DTI along with your gross monthly income. If you do not pay your account in full before the statement date, then you more than likely will have to wait an additional statement cycle before it reports to the credit bureaus. Therefore, your utilization is dynamic and the history of your utilization month-to-month is not recorded forever. Only the current balance. What is maintained and reported is your payment history. So you want to never be late if you want to be approved anytime soon for a mortgage. A lower DTI will not help your interest rate. As long as you stay away from the maximum DTI for the mortgage vehicle you are attempting to be approved for (VA, FHA, Conventional, etc), then your DTI should not be a concern. If you are borderline at the time of underwriting, you can take the opportunity and pay off the balances. The mortgage company can then do what is called a credit supplement which entails contacting those lenders where you have proven you have a zero balance and manually input the zero balance cards, that have not yet reported to the bureaus, in your final application to the mortgage company for underwriting approval. Except for the fact that canceling credit cards will hurt your credit, either by increasing your utilization ratio or decreasing the length of your credit lines if you cancel the oldest card, which makes it that much harder to get the good interest rates available on other loans. I doubt it. If you have a good track record with your car loan, that will count for a lot more than the fact that you don't have it anymore. When you look for a house, your debt load will be lower without the car loan, which may help you get the mortgage you want. Just keep paying your credit card bills on time and your credit rating will improve month by month. First, before we talk about anything having to do with the credit score, we need the disclaimer that the exact credit score formulas are proprietary secrets that have not been revealed.  Therefore, all we have to go on are broad generalities that FICO has given us. That having been said, the credit card debt utilization portion of your score generally has at least two components: an overall utilization, and a per-card utilization. Your overall utilization is taken by adding up all your credit card debt and all your credit limits and dividing.  Using your numbers above, you are sitting at about 95%.  The per-card utilization is the individual utilization of each card.  Your five cards range in utilization from 69% to 100%. Paying one card over another has no affect on your overall utilization, but obviously will change the per-card utilization of the one you pay first.  So, to your question: Is it better on the credit score to have one low-util card and one high-util card, or to have two medium-util cards?  I haven't read anything that definitively answers this question. Here is my advice to you: The big problem you have is the debt, not the credit score.  Your credit card debt should be treated like an emergency that needs to be taken care of as quickly as you possibly can.  Instead of trying to optimize your credit score, you should be trying to minimize the number of days until all of your credit cards are completely paid off.  The credit score will take care of itself once you get your financial situation back on track. There is debate about the order in which one should pay off their debts, but the fact of the matter is that the order is not as significant as the intensity at which you pay them all off.  Dedicate yourself to getting rid of the debts as fast as possible, and it won't matter much which order they get paid off in. Finally, to answer your question, I recommend that you attack the card debt one at a time instead of trying to pay them off evenly.  Not because it will optimize your credit score, but because it will help you focus your debt-reduction energy as you work on resolving your debt emergency.  Fortunately, the credit utilization portion of the credit score has no history, so once you pay all of these off, the utilization portion of your score will get better immediately, and the path you took to get there will be irrelevant. After the credit cards are completely paid off, and you have resolved never to spend money that you don't have again, it is time to work on the student loans.... If the billing cycle is 2 to 3 months, it would mean Banks have to give credit for a longer period and it makes the entire business less profitable as well as more risky compared to the Monthly billing cycle. For example the current monthly billing cycle with a date say of 14th, means if you swipe your card on 1st day, one would effectively get a credit for 30+14, around 44 days. If you swipe on last day, one would get a credit for 14 days. On an average 22 days of credit. If we make this 3 months, the credit period would increase on an average (90+14)/2, 52 days. From a risk point of view, on monthly cycle if there is non-payment its flagged much earlier compared to a 3 months cycle. On offering different dates, shop around. In the older times the cycles were different, however with individuals having several cards, and trying to optimize every purchase to maximize credit period. Quite a few banks have streamlined it to monthly cycle. Shop around and some banks should be able to offer you different dates. "Sometimes when you are trying to qualify for a loan, the lender will ask for proof of your account balances and costs. Your scheme here could be cause for some questions: ""why are you paying $20-30k to your credit card each month, is there a large debt you haven't disclosed?"". Or perhaps ""if you lost your job, would you be able to afford to continue to pay $20-30k"". Of course this isn't a real expense and you can stop whenever you want, but still as a lender I would want to understand this fully before loaning to someone who really does need to pay $20-30k per month. Who knows this might hiding some troublesome issues, like perhaps a side business is failing and you're trying to keep it afloat." A friend of mine has two credit cards.  He has specifically arranged with the card issuers so that the billing cycles are 15 days out of sync.  He uses whichever card has more recently ended its billing cycle, which gives him the longest possible time between purchase and the due date to avoid interest. Your priorities should be: If you end up with additional debt from, say, credit cards, you should probably try to get rid of that first, as it's almost certainly at a higher interest rate than a subsidized student loan. Because you actually have a grace period, I assume these are Federally subsidized loans. Note that there are alternative payment plans available if you are unemployed/underemployed that you should take advantage of, if need be. See Income-based Repayment and related pages for details. See the accepted answer for this question.  What effect will credit card churning for frequent flyer miles have on my credit score? This does not directly answer 'how often...' that you asked, but it states that the answerer opens 5-15 accounts per year.  So the answer to your question is, as often as you want, as long as you manage your account ages. The reason for this is that there are two factors in opening a new account that affect your credit card score.  One is average age of accounts. The other is credit inquiries.  That answerer, with FICO in high 700s, sees about a 5% swing based on new cards and closing old ones. You'll have to manage average age of accounts.  I assume this is done by keeping some older ones open to prop up the average, and by judiciously closing the churn accounts. Finally, if you choose to engage in churning, and you intend to apply for a large loan and want a good credit score, simply pause the account open/close part of the churn a couple of months ahead of time.  Your score should recover from the temporary hits of the inquiries.   The churning communities really do have how to guides which discuss the details of this.  Key phrase: credit card churning. Yes, as long as you are responsible with the payments and treat it as a cash substitute, and not a loan. I waited until I was 21 to apply for my first credit card, which gave me a later start to my credit history. That led to an embarrassing credit rejection when I went to buy some furniture after I graduated college. You'd think $700 split into three interest-free payments wouldn't be too big of a risk, but I was rejected since my credit history was only 4 months long, even though I had zero late payments.  So I ended up paying cash for the furniture instead, but it was still a horrible feeling when the sales rep came back to me and quietly told me my credit application had been denied. Reading Great Lakes' page How Payments Are Applied, I think you are probably correct about how the payments are applied: Interest first, minimum on each loan next, then any extra is applied to the highest interest loan.  If I were you, I would make one payment a month, and I would make that payment as large as I possibly could. Trying to make more than one payment in a month is too complicated (and you aren't sure exactly how those payments get credited), and saving up for a big payment every few months is pointless and will cost you interest. No, because of the balance transfer fees, which could be 4%. Unless of course you get a deal for 12 months of no payment, and you pay it back in 12 months, in which case a 4% annual interest rate is much less than a loan! At that point you are gambling that you will be responsible with the payments, and the card company is taking the opposite bet. Set up a meeting with the bank that handles your business checking account. Go there in person and bring your business statements: profit and loss, balance sheet, and a spreadsheet showing your historical cash flow. The goal is to get your banker to understand your business and your needs and also for you to be on a first-name basis with your banker for an ongoing business relationship. Tell them you want to establish credit and you want a credit card account with $x as the limit. Your banker might be able to help push your application through even with your credit history. Even if you can't get the limit you want, you'll be on your way and can meet again with your banker in 6 or 12 months. Once your credit is re-established you'll be able to shop around and apply for other rewards cards. One day you might want a line of credit or a business loan. Establishing a relationship with your banker ahead of time will make that process easier if and when the time comes. Continue to meet with him or her at least annually, and bring updated financial statements each time. If nothing else, this process will help you analyze your business, so the process itself is useful even if nothing comes of it immediately. A) The Credit Rating Agencies only look at the month-end totals that are on your credit card, as this is all they ever get from the issuing bank. So a higher usage frequency as described would not make any direct difference to your credit rating. B) The issuing bank will know if you use the credit with the higher frequency, but it probably has little effect on your limit. Typically, after two to three month, they reevaluate your credit limit, and it could go up considerably if you never overdrew (and at this time, it could indirectly positively affect your credit rating). You could consider calling the issuing bank after two month and try to explain the history a bit and get them to increase the limit, but that only makes sense if your credit score has recovered. Your business paperwork could go a long way to convince someone, if you do so well now. C) If your credit rating is still bad, you need to find out why. It should have normalized to a medium range with the bad historic issues dropped. It may or may not be a good idea to borrow money from your family; there are many factors to consider here, not the least of which is what you would do if you got in serious financial trouble and couldn't make your scheduled payments on the loan. Would you arrange with them to sell the property ASAP? Or could they easily manage for a few months without your scheduled payments if it were necessary? A good rule of thumb that some people follow when lending to family is this: don't do it unless you're 100% OK with the possibility that they might not pay you back at all. That said, your question was about credit scores specifically. Having a mortgage and making on-time payments would factor into your score, but not significantly more heavily than having revolving credit (eg a credit card) and making on time payments, or having a car loan or installment loan and making on time payments. I bought my house in 2011, and after years of paying the mortgage on time my credit score hasn't changed at all. MyFico has a breakdown of factors affecting your credit score here: http://www.myfico.com/crediteducation/whatsinyourscore.aspx. The most significant are a history of on-time payments, low revolving credit utilization (carrying a $4900 balance on a card with a $5000 limit is bad, carrying a $10 balance on the same card is good), and overall length of your credit history. As to credit mix, they have this to say: Types of credit in use Credit mix determines 10% of my FICO Score The FICO® Score will consider your mix of credit cards, retail accounts, installment loans, finance company accounts and mortgage loans. It's not necessary to have one of each, and it's not a good idea to open credit accounts you don’t intend to use. The credit mix usually won’t be a key factor in determining your FICO Score—but it will be more important if your credit report does not have a lot of other information on which to base a score. Have credit cards – but manage them responsibly Having credit cards and installment loans with a good payment history will raise your FICO Score. People with no credit cards tend to be viewed as a higher risk than people who have managed credit cards responsibly.