Rental application approval

[Mike Adams]

I make about 120k a year and looking to rent a nice condo for about 2000 a month. My score is 620 and is low because of my current debt levels. I have several credit cards with balances but I will have 2 paid off next month which will be about 5k wiped out. But I will be applying in July, so my score won't go up much. Will I have trouble with this score? Also on the rental application when they ask about bank account balance, will they actually verify the balance? I'm not going to have any problem paying rent, I'm just worried about getting approved by a property management company. I will only have about 5k in the bank at the time of applying. I'm also not sure if I should say I have more in my bank account. I'm just really nervous about getting approved. I currently live in a condo and am paying 3k a month so I'm looking to bring it down to 2k a month.

[Fred Heller]

620 is not a "bad" score. As long as you're paying everything on time and have no collection accounts, I would be surprised if you weren't approved. And you're right, having high balances on your credit cards will hurt your credit even if you've never missed a payment.

From everything I've seen about credit scores, the best way to get your score up is to bring your credit card balances to less than 50% of the credit limit. So rather than completely paying off a card, I would use the money to pay down all the cards equally.