Hello folks....
Thanks to divorce and bankruptcy my credit has been in the basement for years. I remarried in 1990 and in 1992 was in a position where I thought my only choice was bankruptcy. Come to find out maybe I should have not listened to that attorney after all. We went to consumer credit counseling at one point before 1992 and tried to go that route but we did not make enough money to make a consolidated payment to them.
Fast forward to 2002 and the bankruptcy came off the credit reports. Fast forward to 2005 and the default student loan was finally satisfied. All that time I was of the opinion that there was no hope for our credit score/worthiness so why try. Yes , I had a pretty bad attitude and unfortunatley all that did is make things much worse vs better. I have learned the hard way that doing something is much better than having a bad attitude and trying to sweep it under the rug.
Fast forward to 2007 and my wife and I have been trying our darndest to raise that magical Fico score. Spent 8 months on a letter writing campaign to Equifax and finally got them to remove all the erroneous junk off that report that was either resolved in bankruptcy or just did not belong to us to begin with. It is amazing how much crap got dumped on us and it did not belong there.
I think that the highest that our score ever got was around 585. We were told that if we got to the magical 600 mark that a credit union here would give us mortgage on our first home. In the last 2.5 years we have done what we can with our limited budget to work on our debt but that train is not moving as fast as I would like it to. The secured credit card offers changed to unsecured credit card offers and we were able to buy a new vehicle for the first time in our 17 years of marriage.
Thanks to a dear credit savy friend of mine kicking me in the posterior and helping me with my attitude we have seen the glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel. I subscribe to MyFico which is a start I guess since it has helped me to get some much needed education. I have the Suze Orman books as well.
I subscribe to the score watch portion of MyFico and I have noticed in 2.5 years that my score has gone up 9 times an come down 8 times. It is frustrating to me that every time they ding me and reduce the score it always goes down twice as fast as it goes up. The last time it dropped by 28 points thanks to my credit card being at the limit. My wife being unemployed and between jobs has not helped things in the least. Every time my score goes up it goes up by less than 15 points. Something about this fight just seems to be a tad bit unfair. In October we are supposed to have some things that have been on our credit report over 7 years fall off so hopefully that will help as well as my getting that cc balance down as well.
