Advice on credit score.
Alright BP, I got a personal one you.
So my wife and I got married recently and given the obvious financial circumstances we had to use credit cards for our wedding etc etc etc.
My credit score is not bad but I'd like it to be higher. I have identified one of our issues being that we are using a majority of the credit available to us. That being said, after conducting various analysis, I am realizing that even if we pay down almost all of our debt (which should be within the next month or so) our credit score would still not increase drastically because we do not have a lot of credit lines open and/or closed and our credit history is relatively young (an average of 5 years between all four credit cards). We still have plenty of credit available and we use it on our daily expenses (i.e. food, gas, utilities) in order to gain some of the rewards but it tends to keep our credit available low. Two questions for you all:
1.) What do you advice to get the score higher other than paying down debt? Should we open another line of credit as to increase our available credit? Should we pay all our groceries with debt? Should we just let our credit history grow older?
2.) Our score should be anywhere from 640-670. Do you all think this would negatively impact a loan or mortgage rate should we choose to go that route? We are looking to buy a house.