From a 347 to a 720: What Debi Honeycutt Knows About Credit That Most Buyers Never Get Told

From a 347 to a 720: What Debi Honeycutt Knows About Credit That Most Buyers Never Get Told

A 347 credit score is the kind of number that ends a conversation. Most loan officers see it, close the file, and tell the referring agent the buyer is not a candidate. Debi Honeycutt has spent almost four decades arguing that this reflex is both wrong and, in her words, something you do not have the right to do to another human being.

Honeycutt is Vice President and Senior Credit Enhancement Specialist at TowneBank Mortgage, and before that she spent more than twenty years inside a credit reporting agency in the Baltimore market, reading raw credit data rather than the cleaned-up consumer version of it. (Full disclosure, offered on the episode itself: Real Estate Excellence host Tracy Hayes is also a TowneBank Mortgage loan officer, and Honeycutt is the resource he sends his hardest files to.)

"There is not a file out there that you can't help," she said on the Real Estate Excellence Podcast. "It may take 12 months to 24 months, but you can help everybody by just doing basic steps." What follows is the version of that argument she makes to agents — and the reason a buyer an agent wrote off two years ago may be closeable right now.

The File Nobody Wanted

The 347 arrived the way those files always arrive: with a loan officer's apology attached. The score was low enough that Honeycutt's system returned only a single bureau to work with. She started anyway, entering scenarios — what to pay off, what to pay down, which accounts to be added to as an authorized user — the same way she does on every file.

What came back was a number she assumed was a system error. The borrower's profile contained a cluster of small medical collections, and the timing coincided with the credit bureaus' removal of medical collection items under $500. Paying down revolving balances and losing the medicals in the same window produced what Honeycutt called a perfect storm.

"I just remember screaming in my office and people came running down the hall," she said. "I'm going, no, this can't be right." She ran it again. Then she added the other two bureaus. The borrower was over 720. "I never expected it in all my days doing this. Never thought this would happen."

She got the score there in about a month, and the loan closed roughly six weeks after that. Honeycutt is careful that nobody hears this as a promise — most files move in three months, six months, twelve, and some take two years. But she offers the story to agents for a specific reason. "It only takes one of those to inspire you to look at the next 300-and-something score."

The other thing she wants agents to hear is what the borrower told her afterward. She was a single parent who had been rebuilding after a hard stretch, and her comment was not about the score. It was that no one had ever taken the time. Honeycutt's success stories skew heavily toward that profile — single parents, families rebuilding after a job loss or an illness, buyers who have been told no so many times they stopped asking why.

The Score Your Buyer Sees Is Not the Score You Pull

The most common friction point in Honeycutt's week is a buyer who arrives certain of their own credit score, because an app told them so.

"The mortgage pull and a Credit Karma — or I like to call it a retail pull from a Discover card or something like that — totally different than a mortgage pull," she said. "The algorithms are totally different. So what you and I would look at to see where they are, and they're 640, Credit Karma might come back and they're a 680. It's just not apples and apples."

She is not dismissive of consumer monitoring products. She considers them genuinely useful for the thing they are good at: showing a consumer what is on their profile, whether it belongs to them, and whether it is being reported correctly. That is a real service, and the fraud environment of the last several years is exactly why those products found a market. What they are not is a preview of the number an underwriter will see, and they typically draw from a single bureau.

This gap has become more consequential since the episode aired, not less. Under current Federal Housing Finance Agency policy, lenders delivering loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may choose between two approved credit score models — Classic FICO and VantageScore 4.0, which was approved for use in July 2024 — and may use either a tri-merge or bi-merge credit report. FICO 10T has been validated but is not yet in use for loan delivery; the enterprises expect to publish historical FICO 10T scores in the summer of 2026 and adopt the model later. In other words, there is now more than one legitimate answer to the question "what is my score," and none of them is the one on the buyer's phone.

Honeycutt's practical instruction to consumers has not changed and costs nothing. Pull the free report at annualcreditreport.com — a service the bureaus have since expanded to weekly access — and read it for accuracy rather than for the number. "It does not have a score attached to it, but it shows what's on your profile," she said. "If something's not yours and it's out there, that's almost as deadly as not having anything."

And if something on the report is genuinely fraudulent, her first call is not to the credit bureau. It is to the card company, and then to the police department. "I would go to the police station and I would list the four items that have now fallen on your account," she said. A report gives a dispute weight that a phone call does not. "Very few people go down to the station and file a false claim."

Medical Collections: What Changed, and What Has Since Changed Back

The bureau policy that helped produce Honeycutt's 347-to-720 file is worth stating precisely, because the landscape around it has moved twice since.

Beginning in 2022, the three national credit bureaus voluntarily adopted three restrictions: they stopped reporting medical debt less than a year delinquent, they removed paid medical collections entirely, and — effective in the spring of 2023 — they excluded medical collections under $500 from consumer reports. Those voluntary policies are still in place.

What is not in place is the broader federal rule. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule in January 2025 barring medical debt from credit reports used in lending decisions and prohibiting creditors from considering it. That rule was vacated on July 11, 2025, by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Cornerstone Credit Union League v. CFPB. Fifteen states have since enacted their own medical debt reporting restrictions, several of which took effect during 2025 and 2026. Florida is not currently among them.

The practical upshot for a Northeast Florida buyer is that medical collections of $500 or more still sit on the report and still have to be dealt with — which is exactly the situation Honeycutt built a playbook for.

Her instruction is to go around the collection agency where possible. "I would call that nice girl at Dr. Y's bookkeeping — see if I paid you directly, will you give me a letter paid in full, remove," she said. "I don't care that they pay. The fact is it's going to say delete, remove, and I'm going to send that into the bureau." Some practices will insist the payment go through the collection agency but will still furnish the letter afterward, because the agency generally will not remove the item without instruction from the original creditor. Honeycutt's requirements for that documentation are exacting, and she wants agents and borrowers to understand that this is not bureaucratic theater. "I'm very explicit about what has to be on that documentation. I really mean it. It's not a game."

Turnaround on a rescore is typically three to five days. On at least one occasion it has been three hours, on a Friday afternoon, ahead of a four o'clock closing.

One detail buyers should know and rarely do: rescoring costs the lender money, and that cost cannot be passed to the consumer. Honeycutt notes that credit report costs themselves have risen sharply in recent years, which is why she pushes borrowers to handle directly whatever they can — some creditors will send an update straight to the bureau on an electronic form — and reserves paid rescores for the items that actually require them.

Utilization, Age, and the Points Buyers Give Away for Free

Most of the damage Honeycutt undoes was self-inflicted by people acting on reasonable-sounding instincts.

The first is closing paid-off cards. "Don't close any credit cards," she said. An old account is carrying the length-of-history weight that a new one cannot replicate, and using it every couple of months keeps it contributing. If a borrower insists on reducing the number of cards, she would let go of the most recently opened ones and keep the oldest.

The second is the seasonal store card. The fifteen percent off at the register in December is not, in her accounting, worth what it does to a file that is being positioned for a mortgage. "Your 10% is not going to make or break anything that I do. I just don't recommend doing that." A borrower who is twelve months out has room to absorb the hit and recover in thirty to ninety days. A borrower who is house hunting does not.

The third is inactivity, and Honeycutt's example is her own. She stopped using a department store card for eight months, walked up to a register with twenty people behind her, and was declined — the issuer had closed the account. The related risk is quieter: an issuer that does not close an unused account may cut the limit, which raises utilization on a file where nothing else has changed.

Utilization is where she wants agents to focus a buyer's attention, because it is the fastest lever. Her target is thirty percent of the limit rather than fifty when a borrower is positioning for a loan, and the denominator is as adjustable as the numerator. "You can call and have your credit limit increased," she said. "That could make a life-and-death difference in a loan, because you're raising it $2,500 or $5,000 and your balance stays the same, but now you're at 20%."

She also wants borrowers to ask for things they assume are unavailable. A single thirty-day late on a decade-old account can often be removed through a one-time courtesy waiver, and a removed late is treated as though it never existed. On the file she was describing, that one request moved the score roughly fifty points.

And she wants to correct the most persistent myth in the category, because it costs buyers real money at the wrong moment. Paying off an installment loan is not a scoring strategy. "People think that if I pay my car off or I pay the mortgage off, that's going to bump me a 100 points. No. I get very little bump from a car. It's the revolving." Her guidance to borrowers close to paying off a vehicle is to keep making the minimum payment, get the score where it needs to be, and bring the payoff money to closing if debt ratio requires it.

Two more, quickly. Frozen files have to be unfrozen — twenty-four hours is enough to pull, then lock it back up. And she is skeptical of the subscription credit repair model, not because those companies are all bad but because of what their payment schedules do to a mortgage timeline. "They'll take the money and they'll pay the bills, and they'll pay them when they are going to pay them, not necessarily when they're due. So now we have a running late situation, and that's deadly for me, because I can't have lates in the last 12."

What Honeycutt is describing is not a set of tricks. It is a road map handed to a borrower with five specific steps on it, and an honest acknowledgment that the borrower is the one who has to walk it. "They have to want that house more than I want it for them," she said — which is exactly why the agents who send her the 400-scores instead of discarding them keep getting calls back saying their buyer is ready to look.

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