One year ago I was too ashamed and felt like too much of a complete dirt bag to even face my dismal credit situation, much less improve it. It was a topic I tended to avoid altogether. I finally faced the music in December of last year and when I finally decided I would like to finally own a home of my own some day. EQ @ 469; EX @ 470 and TU @ 489 was a bitter, horrible site to see. Even worse, I had defaulted on a student loan which was in rehabilitation stage, the few credit cards I had were over the limit and delinquent, and I had lots of charge offs. The only thing I had in my favor was a Capital One auto loan which was never late and directly debited from my checking account every month.
So I set out last December to start changing things around with the following actions:
1) Paid down my existing delinquent credit card accounts to a ZERO balance (and kept them in good monthly standing from there on);
2) Continued diligently paying my student loan on time every month so that I could get it completely rehabilitated (it was REHABILITATED in June of 2014!);
3) Went through my credit reports and challenged any item that was too old, obvious mistakes, and any items I could make a plausible argument against. (I managed to get quite a few items deleted!); and
4) Opened numerous new accounts and paid them ON TIME every month and kept the balances low (mostly secured credit cards and subprime retail merchandise cards (7 total new accounts)).
My student loan is rehabilitated, my debt-credit ratio is about 10%, ALL bills have been paid on time since December 2013 and ZERO new delinquencies or collection items have appeared in my reports.
The result 8 months later has been phenominal!
Dec 2013: EQ @ 469; EX @ 470; TU @ 489
Aug 2014: EQ @ 610; EX @ 621; TU @ 654
I am looking forward to even further improvements in my score and hope to qualify for a VA home loan by Spring of next year. I hope my store can give others who have been in my situation a sense of hope and a good sense of what is possible. In my case I have always had a job and had money to spend. It was a bad case of being irresponsible for the longest time.
Starting Score: September 2013 - EQ 548 EX 610 TU 555
