<prompt> Human: Posting from a throwaway. Last month I took advantage of two balance transfers on two separate cards. Were looking to buy a house in about a year and I really want to kill off as much CC debt as possible. Before I did this, one card raised the limit by 1000 and I also made a 1000 payment. I was hoping that this would help my overall CC utilization. Before the transfer, I had 15K spread over 3 cards with a total limit of 43K, my credit score was 723. Last night I checked my score on Credit Karma and they show a drop of 56 points for their two credit reporting agencies Equifax and something else. I believe its because the balance transfer put one of the cards at the limit and then the balance transfer fee pushed the card over the limit. Ive already made a payment to bring the balance lower than the limit but is there anything I can do to fix my credit score? It also mentioned that two of my cards were over 60 utilization. I was under the impression that the credit score just took overall utilization into account. The balances on these cards are mostly from putting myself through college and also paying to move to another state for a job several years ago. My wife and I faithfully use a budget YNAB and weve shrank this debt significantly over the past several years. We havent increased the balance on our cards at all in about two years.  <response>: Good news is, if your fix your utilization your credit score will recover quickly. You should clear up this debt before you buy a house anyway.A utilization affected score is the easiestquickest kind of score you can recover. When it comes close to time to get a pre-approval, you should be at like 5 utilization.If however you find you are still carrying a balance by the time you want to buy a house, you arent ready to buy a house. 