Hello to all the board members! I am very happy to have found this forum.
I was approved for $1500 a Barclays MC and thought I'd give it a shot for a CLI right off the bat. I called the back door number and the analyst was very pleasant and unfortunately wasn't able to give me the increase, he went over my bureau line by line with me and said based on what he is looking at in a few months I should get one. They did not do another hard pull, I just received the card in the mail yesterday. I was surprised though when he was going over my CR with me he mentioned my secured WF Visa, I thought it reported as a regular account but he knew it was secured.
I've had the WF Visa for 17 months and have not graduated nor would they speak to me about it when I called, they said it's automatically done in the system.
Long story short I am very happy to have the Barclays card and have another $1500 Visa from my Credit Union. I have been working diligently cleaning my report and paying off old medical debts that piled up due to an illness. Now a little over a year after I started fixing my CR's all of the derog accounts that were paid were removed from my report and the only thing left in public records is a BK from 11/04. It was a time consuming process and did it through a company specializing in helping correct reporting on your CR. I owned up and made lots of calls and paid lots of bad debts even though many of them would not do a pay for delete I found that after I paid them off and the credit repair company sent them a letter to confirm the debt the collection agency wouldn't bother and just stopped reporting it because I had paid it. It wasn't magic it just took time. This included the companies that flatly refused to do a pay for delete, after I paid them they no longer bothered to confirm the debt. Because of that hard work I have been able to lease a new car and have been pre approved for a mortgage.
Before I started the process of repairing my credit my FICO was 514, and it has been steadily growing since not as quickly as I'd like but growing. I am considering closing my Wells Fargo Secured Visa. With the 2 other Visa cards I really don't have use for it anyway other than utilzation but I pay all cards in full every month anyway. Oh and forgot to mention, thanks to what I read on these boards I did the shopping card trick and got an HSN and JCrew card $1000 each.
Any advice whould be great on getting my score up quicker, if for nothing else, for my ego, would love to have high credit limits in my cards.
Congrats on the approval ! i am in the same boat yet i havent been apping for ccs as i have been focused on a mortage approval- may i ask or can you pm what company you used with your mid score if they are the same as whats in your siggy.
Thank you 