@Anonymous wrote:So like a lot of people on here, and a lot of threads on here, I made some mistakes in the past with my credit and have been working the past 18 months to help rectify them.
This year I hit the 7 1/2 year mark for the CAs that were on my report and nearly everything has fallen off. Two CAs remained, and popped up fairly recently, but were essentially errors, and are slated to be deleted. One was from an apartment I was at 2 years ago, charging a "cleaning" fee, and the other from DirectTV for not returning equipment. I got these handled as the apartment never did a final walk through with me, and i had returned the DirectTV equipment.
That all being said once these two drop off I am hoping for a credit score boost. Currently on myFICO my scores all all between 630-640. I have 18 (also my AAoA) months of on time payments with two secured cards, Wells Fargo, and First Progress. Both are currently paid off and have low $300 limits.
My question to you guys is where do I go from here? Should I wait for the last two baddies to get deleted and then apply for a legit card? What kind of score bump do you think I will see when the two recent CAs drop off? What cards should I look at with my limited history? Should I drop any more money into my secured lines to show higher limits before applying for anything else?
I don't have mortgage, make about 50K, and have about 20k in student loans.
Help me with where to go from here :-)
Thanks guys!!
First thing you want to do is have one of those cards report a small balance of no more than 9% of its CL, all cards at 0 is a Fico score drop. I would wait till the derogs are gone then go ahead and app for whatever unsecured cards you want. You want to have at minimum 3 open bankcards and 1 store card. You will probably see a good bump when those CAs are gone. I would not put any further funds into the secured cards and I would be looking to close them out after they pass 24 months of history and you are getting good unsecured cards.
@Anonymous wrote:Thanks for the reply!!
That sounds like a pretty good plan, I ran a few pre approvals just to see, nothing showing yet for the ones I ran...Hopefully this will change when those derogs are removed.
Ill go ahead and hit like a $20 charge on one of the cards to prevent $0.
My goal is to close out the secured cards, im just worried about that hitting my score for AAoA. I guess I better wait until I get a few unsecured in the wallet.
any specific cards you can think of that might consider my 18 month file to be acceptable?
AAoA isnt affected immediately by closing a positive account, they stay around for up to 10 years post close. I would look first to Chase for pre approvals once your derogs are gone, they typically look to TU for pre approvals and EX for the actual approval. You might also consider a Cap-1 QS. You really need to sit down and decide what you want in a card before you app for anything (cash back, travel rewards, low interest, etc) and then search for cards that will match. Barclays is another one to look at they have some pretty good cards. CUs are another place to look, your local ones and some nationals DCU, NASA, NAVY if you qualify.