<prompt> Human: There is a defaulted card for 500 from Sears we are going to pay off as well.Also all the credit is in my husbands name I dont have any cause I canceled and close out all my cards quite a few years ago. Also the car is both a want and need we have had to replace the ignition twice which isnt cheap. Edit: some of you are asking why are you in any debt if you make so much as a household, well my husband and I just got very good stable jobs and went from a household making 23k a year to 65k. We were living paycheck to paycheck. Why did my husband choose to put the computer on the card... I have no idea. We have talked this all over. The car is for him, so he can drive to and from work. I never said it was a NEW car just that we were looking at getting a car. The car we have is not doing so well with al the repairs we have to take on. I am aware of the debt and am doing something about it. We can finally get on our feet again. I was just asking how long it would take to build this credit back up because the plot thickens we are thinking of getting a house in the next couple years. The money we have is going to our credit cards to pay those debts down.Assistant: Depends. Do you have perfect history, but just high utilization? If so, about a month. Otherwise, paying off your debt, while a good idea, probably wont increase your score too much high utilization isnt really that big of a knock anyway. Human: Well usually we keep the balance down to about 200 and pay it off every few months but my husband just purchased a very highend computer that cost about 3000 in parts. Weve held the balance at about 2200 for a while because of some other financial issuses. Since we got this little bit of income influx we wanted to take the opportunity to pay some bills. Our credit score was at a 770 for a very long time but since we have held this balance for about 5 to 6 month it has dropped to about 550. Not sure if it will increase much in one month. We are looking at purchasing a new car and dont want our interest rates to be crazy high.Assistant: Theres no way an outstanding balance of 2200 dollars would drop your score 220 points, unless you just stopped paying the bill entirely. Is there some other factors you left out? Is your total available credit really low?If 2200 dollars is most of your total available credit it could be a factor. Human: When my husband purchased hlthe computer it almost maxed the card out. We were going to pay it off right away. But like I said some stuff came up and we had to only make the minimum payments for a while  <response>: Even maxing out your card and paying the minimum wont bring your score down that much, not even close. 