How to bump up my credit for buying a house in a year (open another card or not)

Question

Here's a rough breakdown of my non detailed credit report.

I want to buy a house well condo in a year. I am in the 28% tax bracket. I have 20% or more down to avoid PMI.

My question is this credit too low to pull it off? The reason my utilization is so high is because I put all my expenses on the card and pay them off each month.

The only thing I can change is the available limit. Capitol one denied increasing my 4.5K card but they didn't run a real report. Should I try and open another credit card to increase my credit score (only have 2 and a 2 years paid off out of 3 year car loan).

My total credit won't increase so I was wondering if it makes sense to open another credit card. I will have another inquiry which is a minus but will have maybe 3-5k more credit. Should I do that or stick and hold at my current situation?

Mind you I know before getting the mortgage to pay for everything in cash so I am utilizing 0% of my available credit. I could pay off my car loan early but I enjoy the extra leverage for investing.

Answer 1

The question Should I keep recently opened Credit Cards that I don't use? will provide some useful details for you, including an elaboration of the comment from VBCPP regarding zero usage.

686 isn't bad. I am a real estate agent, and find that banks are typically looking for 640 or higher for their loans.

Your scorecard is a great way to understand what you can work on. Keep paying on time (of course), the new card - it depends on how many existing accounts you have. If your 2 year average is 24 months/2 accounts, and you add one right now, in one year, you'd be at 16 months/3 accounts. There's not much else you can do for that one except to allow time to pass. Of course, there's the improvement to showing more accounts open, but the hit from a recent credit inquiry. Utilization, discussed in the linked article, can be finely tuned by making small payments mid cycle, i.e to pay enough before the bill is cut to drop the utilization. This easily gets utilization to an "A" and you can try this sooner than later to see the effect.