@Anonymous wrote:
Ok, so I'll try to make this short and sweet. Hubby and I filed BK in 2007, have been trying to rebuild credit since then, he lost his job in 08 and was unemployed for a yr. We have some medical bills in collections on our credit reports, and suprisingly, alot of my medical bills have landed on his report and not mine for some reason. My EQ score right now is 639 his is 553, well now 515 since we did dispute some inaccurate information(i.e. a debt we reaffirmed and paid off after BK, a charge off not listed on our BK, a fraudulent charge from a college he never attended) . So I'm hoping it will help, although I've read sometimes it doesn't. Good things we have going are a car loan after bk that's been fully paid off, a new car loan that we are paying on, each of us have a credit card from Cap one that we got 8 months ago with no lates, and I have a new Smile brands credit line that I will be paying on monthly.
We really want to improve our credit to buy a home... here are a couple options we are looking at.
1. Pay off all old collections from the last 2 years (amounts to only 650, so can be done next month) but trying to do GW or PFDs on these first.
2. Pay down his Cap one ($500 limit and we are close to the limit) then mine next month and leave the collections where they are for now.
3. Should I add him as an authorized user on my card and him vice versa? Should I add him to the Smile brands loan? Will that help his credit?
We could dispute the medical bills and have them moved to my credit, but that would only make both our credits just as bad right?
Appreciate any info you can give!
I would certainly work on trying to negotiate a PFD on the collections. They are major derogatory items and will really hurt your FICO score.
The best place to start in terms of optimizing your FICO revolving utilization is to let one card report a small balance, less than 9%, and all other cards reporting zero balances. If you only have one revolving account showing then I would definately add each other as AUs ~ FICO scoring likes to see several open revolving accounts.
I wouldn't do anything with the Smile loan unless it is reporting as a revolving account. It sounds like it is an installment account.
There is a HIPPA process to remove medical collections that some people have used to successfully remove collections, if you google it you should be able to find the steps.
March2010 FICO® ~ 695 TU, 653 EQ, 697 EX
