MCA Part 2
Forgot the main point......
By following this system, on average, homeowners are/have paying their homes off in 11 years and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest payments avoided w/ early payoff.
Well you do need good credit card discipline. If you have it, then you save the HELOC interest charges and save the lump sum set up fees the program administrators will charge you -- money that you could apply to debt reduction instead.
According to the banker at my local bank they CC companies prefer around 45% utilization. I think 25-45 is good.
Paying down both your credit cards some will help your score, though how much and to what level is highly speculative as to what helps. I would take your CC with the lowest limit and pay it down below 50% and then pay down the other card as much as you can. That being if interest rates were the same or close on both.
I have my credit monitored and my score gets reported to me everytime my score changes. I have a CC with a $10K limit, that went from an $800 balance to a $2,500 balance and my score dropped 7 points that day - go figure. I am one of those anal guys when it comes to credit, so I know that is the only account that updated that day and it was the reason given for the score change.
I will pay it off this month and see where the score goes next.
If you get your FICO score from the co. issuing the scores and pay for the service they can tell you waht you can do to increase your score and approx. how much it will improve based on what you do. Good luck!