Credit Repair

[Lady_J]

Hello all. I have been lurking the past few days so I finally decided to ask for advice. I have been trying to repair my credit for the past ten months. In May 2012 my Equifax scores was 423. As of yesterday it is 553. I have a car loan that I opened in May. And I just opened a secured credit card with NFCU. I work two jobs and I'm a single mother of three. So free time to write letters and make phone calls to dispute and get things removed from my credit reports is non existent. Any advice or suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks!

[guiness56]

Welcome to the forums.

First, if you have not already done so, get your free reports from annualcreditreport.com.  You get one free from each CRA every 12 months.

In order to rebuild you should have all three reports as they are not always identical.

Where did  you get your score?

Start with your CR and look for obvious errors, like accounts that should be gone by now and accounts that are not yours.  These you can dispute with the CRAs.

If anything else is on the reports, you can cut and paste TLs so we can look at them.

[Lady_J]

I actually got my score from the Equifax site. I signed up for it yesterday. I got the score from all three. Credit Reports were included. I have browsed through them but haven't looked at them in detail.

[guiness56]

The scores you got are not real FICO scores.  They are FAKOs.   EX has not sold their score to the consumer since Feb 2009.  You are very limited as to where you can get actual FICOs.  EQ does have one but it is rough trying to find it on their site.  They don't make it easy.

You can get your EQ and TU here.  EX is mainly from lenders/creditors.  I know there is a CU in PA if you are a member you can get it there.

The reason I bring this up is there can be a huge variance between a FAKO and a FICO.  And most lenders use FICO scores.