My bank app sent a notification on a Tuesday morning while I was in line at the coffee place near the office in Skokie: "Your score has changed." I almost didn't open it, because for two years that notification only meant bad news. It said 709.
In March, when I started this blog, my score was 668. Three months later it's 709. I didn't do anything clever. I did three plain things and mostly waited.
What I actually did
First, I paid off my credit card balance. In March I owed $2,350 from my Rogers Park year, at 27.24% APR. I put every extra dollar at it through March, April and May while making the regular $330 on my student loans, and it hit zero in May. The interest over those three months came to about $96, which annoys me, but it's a lot less than it would have been if I'd kept paying minimums.
Second, I set up autopay on my student loans and on my credit card minimums. My one late payment, from November 2023, happened because I didn't have autopay on the loans when repayment started again. Now the minimum is paid automatically, and I pay extra by hand on top. (I'm planning to put autopay on literally every bill later this year, but the debts came first.)
Third, I didn't open anything. No store card for 15% off at the register, no new card for a sign-up bonus, no car loan. Every application for new credit usually means a hard inquiry, and new accounts lower the average age of your accounts. Neither is a huge deal on its own, but I wanted a clean three months.
Month by month
Here's what the app showed, roughly at the middle of each month:
- March: 668. Card balance $2,350, about 52% of my total card limits.
- April: 676. Balance down to about $1,500 after two big payments.
- May: 688. Balance around $500 when the statement closed.
- June: 709. The May statement reported a $0 balance.
Those numbers are from one free score in my bank app. Different scoring models and different lenders will show different numbers, sometimes by twenty points or more. What matters to me is the direction, and that I'm watching the same model every month.
Which move mattered most
Paying off the card, by a lot. Credit utilization is one of the biggest pieces of most scores, and it's calculated from the balance your card company reports to the bureaus, usually on your statement closing date. That's why my score didn't jump the day I made my last payment. It jumped about a month later, after the statement showing $0 got reported.
The nice thing about utilization is that it has no memory in most scoring models. Once the balance drops, the score responds the next time the balance is reported. A late payment works the opposite way. It stays on your report for seven years and only fades slowly as it ages. My November 2023 late payment is still there and still holding me back a little. I can't undo it. I can only keep stacking on-time months on top of it.
Autopay and not opening new accounts didn't cause a jump by themselves. They're more like guardrails. They kept me from creating a new problem while the card payoff did the heavy lifting.
Honestly, a little anticlimactic. I expected some big moment, and instead it was a number in an app while I waited for an iced coffee. But it's the first time my score has been above 700, and that line matters for things I care about, like renting an apartment someday and paying less for car insurance once I'm on my own policy.
I told my mom at dinner. She asked if 709 was good. I said it's "good, not great," which is also how I'd describe my cooking. She said that was the most honest thing I'd said all week.
Now that the card is gone, the money that was going there is going to my student loans. Starting this month, I'm paying $1,100 a month instead of $330. The score will probably drift up slowly from here, since there's no big balance left to pay off. That's fine. Slow is the plan now.
