Summer of 2013, my husband and I started our credit clean-up journey to prepare for mortgage pre approval for our next home. Our family recently expanded by two bouncing baby boys and 6 people in 1200 square has become a bit tight. We have owned our current home for almost 8 years. In those 8 years we have suffered some financial setbacks and made some not so great financial decisions but we have managed to dig out with the blessing of my husband's job, some student loans several years ago :-( , and tons of hardwork and some tears. We are currently in the best financial position we have been in in our married lives but our credit scores held onto the past tightly. Thanks to myFICO community, I have been working tirelessly on repairing my husband's dinged credit and my student loan debt laden credit. My main focus has been cleaning his reports up to get his score in mortgage pre approval range since he will be the sole borrower on our next home. I forgot to document the beginning credit scores of our journey, boo, but we have recently secured pre approval for a mortgage through a local lender! :-)
Roughly dear husband's scores began roughly as:
At lowest...........Summer 2013----myFICO: EX 639 EQ 634 TU 563
January 2014-----myFICO: EX 680 EQ 666 TU 626 (Haven't pulled since several things have updated)
Lender pull on September 3, 2013-----EX 614 EQ 656 TU 614
FAKO---EX (August 2013) 636
EX (January 25, 2014) 696
I worked through each of his credit reports and focused on one or two problems at a time. It was an incredibly slow process.
He started with:
5 medical collection accounts (2 small unpaid totalling about $220)
Paid/closed JCP store card with 120+ days late in 2009
Paid/closed Home Depot/Citi card with 120+ days late in 2009
1 60 day late on mortgage in 2009
Settled/paid in full repossed auto in 2009
Citicard utilization at 60%
I chipped away at each baddie.
One medical collection for $520 was blessedly easy to pay for delete. I paid. It was removed relatively quickly!
Second medical collection was $65.00 and paid years ago, scheduled to fall off in 3 years. I emailed the CA and asked for a goodwill adjustment. They removed within a week! I didn't hear anything from them, it was just gone.
Third, and most recent medical collection, was with NCO/99 Financial for $1450. When paid I requested a pay for delete but they were adamant they couldn't do that. We paid just to get it changed to paid. Actually settled/paid in full. I sent one email via their website contact form around August 2013 to request goodwill removal. I heard nothing. Around this time, I was seeing no real positive score bumps so I was very discouraged and decided to take a break from it all. I picked back up with another email sent via their website contact form AND a snail mail letter around December.
In the mean time we paid down the only credit card left with a balance from 60% uti to about 40% (not much but got us under 50%) and got a few credit score points for it.
I also emailed and snail mailed our Home Depot/Citi card via Home Depot CEO to see about goodwilling our lates. My email was forwarded to someone in his office. They were very helpful but I was told they were reporting accurate information, though they would love to help us out if they could. I ended up with a dispute comment on his reports from them which scared me some after reading these boards. I emailed her back to see if she could help get the dispute comments removed. She got back with me quickly and got in touch with citibank. During this time we had already been preapproved for a mortgage FINALLY (as of last week!) so I was a little nervous about the dispute comments and the score effects. The comment was removed and we got a pretty decent score BUMP because they actually changed our account to IN GOOD STANDING/NEVER LATE!!! WOOHOOO
Last night I checked reports again, I'm a bit obsessed, and the NCO/99 Fin has been deleted!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We are very much on our way to getting into our next home and I have this community to thank for it!!! I used every single bit of information I've learned here and we are on our way! Now we just have to get our current house sold so we can move on to making an offer on our next home and then the nerves for underwriting and such begin.
THANK YOU!!!
