Credit Advice

First, look under the hood and pull up both your and your wife's credit report on AnnualCreditReport.com (it's a government-mandated site that provides free credit reports once a year from each of the three credit bureaus).

Both of your scores might be getting mistakenly damaged by errors, inaccuracies, and misreported information on your credit reports. If you find errors that are likely dinging your score, report right away to the credit bureaus.

Second, you mention that "our score" dipped to 718. Unless the two of you took out a loan, mortgage, or other line of credit together (which effectively joins your credit history so that both of your financial actions impact both scores), your credit scores do not impact each other's after marriage. You two have separate credit scores.

BUT, if you both took out a loan or credit together, its possible your wife has a huge negative financial action in her credit history that is dragging down both of your scores. So if your wife had a bankruptcy in the past you don't know about, you can bet that your credit score is going to feel it.

If you've gone through everything above and your score is STILL depressingly low, maybe take more positive actions. One of the components of a credit score is a mix of credit, such as a few credit cards AND an auto loan AND a mortgage AND etc. It also takes a healthy amount of credit utilization (under the Credit Karma Credit Report Card), which is your debt to available credit ratio. Check out the rest of your Credit Karma Credit Report Card to see what other components of your credit report you can work on.

GOOD LUCK!

Keep using ur credit cards. If u only pay off ur credit but dont use it, it goes down. I know its retarded. I paid off all my 4 credit cards off & my score dropped dramatically. You need to keep using your cards & keep paying them. That's what they want. And try having 3 lines of credit. It helps!