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the way the figure your score involves your available credit vs your balances. We have balances that are low in relation to our limits(fact of life that we have them, but truthfully we are WAY better off than 95% of the usa). Anything, alledgely, over a 35% ratio of balance to available is a negative towards your credit. Like many others here, we use the cards as we need to, but again i stress that MOST people don't use them responsibly..,.other have the oppositre view and are judgemental and condescnding if you have ANY balance..we are in the middle, our total debit is always coming down and was really the result of fixing our home after we were ripped off by a builder (he left our house completely torn aparts and it at one point had only a partial roof in the back)
Living with that debit is not that bad for me, I know we are still well within our means and we are paying them off. This just comes as a nice suprise that kinda screws us for other things at a time when it really didn't need to happen. (employers use credit scores to hire, other cards regularly view the scores and raise rates if a rapid up tick in useage occurs)
I have managed to save some $ (not alot but a month's salary) to have some emergency funds, but i am not really wanting to use them to pay these off in one chunk and leave me with no savings
to give you scale, we have a 90,000 house, we could have bought a 500,000 house and chose to be fiscally responsible. we then recast the note to bring it up to 130k...and toof the cash to remodel the house (built in the 1880's) the builder did in excess of 70k in damage, and we have in the past 3 years repaired almost all of it save the interior sheetrock that was damaged from weather. we then had a 130 foot 6 foot high retaining wall need replacing (the town mad eus do it) that cost 30k....(we took out a 30k loan for that) still in all our outlay is well less than other around us and we have plenty of room to live. not as good as I could hope, but we are plugging along, climbing out of the hole more and more every month
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"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both"
~Benjamin Franklin
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