First off I want to start by introducing myself and say these boards have been a wealth of knowledge. Thank you all for that 
Okay I want to give some background. We signed a lease purchase on our home as we feel it will be our forever home and it's a still for what we got. We have 2 younger children and want somewhere they can grow up. We will be purchasing the home for 179,00 which is a great price and under value.
However, here's the problem and I hope I don't get flamed. I just need some real advice. I am now 30, however in my young and mid 20s i made some very bad decisions. My wife and I built a home right out of college. Fast forward 3 years and we had great credit but carried way too much debt. Being young and stupid we decided the easy way out of that debt was a chapter 7 back in 2007 yet we reaffirmed our home. However, my job and the economy tanked in 2009. We decided to sell our home. We had a 2nd mortage that we owed about 50k on. We also had a car that we were behind on. Thanks to our fabulous (insert sarcasim) lawyer who had advised us to file chapter 7 he advised us to file a 5year plan chapter 13 even though it may not be discharged, but so we could pay off the car and home equity with breathing room. WORST DECISION EVER!!! We paid into that for 3 years up until December of '12 and got out of it when we got a second opinion realizing this bankruptcy could never be discharged and all that was left was the car, a few minor credit cards, and some on the home equity. We volunterlly discharged in December of '12. Then the rebuilding begain. In march we reached a settlement on the car to pay $6700 for title and settlement. We did this and traded in it to have an auto loan on our credit. We made arrangements with the home equtiy. We have about 4 credit cards each (all with fairly low limits but NO late payments. These cards range from getting them in 2011-2013) My mid score is about 550 right now. I also have a collection from Tmobile by diversified consulants from march of 2012. It's for $1150 although that's WAY more than I should owe. Should I try to call and settle that? However, we want to do whatever we need to to get finacing on our home. We can't put 10% down but we have already but 3.5% up in escrow as we are doing a lease purchase. What do you guys suggest I do? Right now all my credit balances together are around 2500 and pretty close to utlization. I'm going to be paying them all of this much and score simulator says my score will be around 620. I should add at that point we will only have an auto loan and the proposed mortage and I make $72,000 so our DTI will be good. Anything else I should do? I am VERY determined. I know you may read this and think I am very stupid. I did make some stupid mistakes and they have followed me all the way since 2007. I'm still pretty young as I'm only 30 and I certianly wish I had been given better finicial advise younger in life, however there is nothing I can do but move up from there. Thank you for any help at all to get me where I need to be.
Go to the rebuilding section of the forum for some really good advice. Since every case is different there are so many people on there with different situations you will get some good advice.
I know having high uti kills your score.
I just recently dealt with a Tmobile collection. I sent a debt validation and Tmobile actually sent me the last few bills. I then paid Tmobile directly and the CA removed the collection from my report. It was pretty simple.
