I joined these great forums back in 2012 when I had a 438 Fico score and not a single good credit line. With the help of this forum and hard work I was able to rebuild my credit and get my Fico scores to the 800's and build a credit card portfolio with over 600K in credit lines.
Unfortuanatly I ended up getting a little carried away and put myself in a worse position than I started in 2012. With my new found credit freedom I was doing great for a year or so until I started to use the credit to elevate my lifestyle without having enough income to support it.
I was able to hang on to my great credit for quite a long time but eventually I hit a wall and it all came crashing down. I spent several months contemplating bankruptcy, talked to attorneys, friends, family. In the end I avoided bankruptcy but pretty much defaulted on all my credit accounts ruining my hard built relationships with just about every bank out there and tanking my credit scores.
This might sound like a sad story but it turned out to be quite the opposite. This was a hard but invaluable lesson to learn. I am now 1 year into defaulting on all my credit lines and I am very optomistic that the road to repair looks much clearer than it did in 2012. I spent hours and hours reading on these forums back then, asking questions. Now I am well prepared to start my credit recovery again.
I have recently changed careers and have been very fortuanate to be able to geatly increase my earning ability. Ive started contactinjg my creditors and have been amazed at how open and willig they are to repair my relationships with them.
I had 5 Amex cards( 2 paid off already in full) and Amex has agreed to reinstate 3 of my 5 cards as soon the balance is paid off and this is not the Optima program. They will be reinstating my Gold Biz, Personal Gold and Personal SPG card with limits of $7500, $5000 and $5000. This will be a great start to repair and will also give me some decent credit lines to work with, its been tough for the last year using debit card only for certain things. The next creditor on my list is Chase. I will be posting about my results there in the near future.
This time around I have a much better undertanding of how to use credit wisely and to keep that use under control & in check.
Ill be posting more now while I rebuild but I wanted to share the basics of my story, maybe I can help some others out there to avoid making these mistakes. In some ways you have to make these mistakes in life to really learn, its all part of the process.
