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Hello Everyone
I've lurked on this board for years, but I finally decided to finally be an active participant. I've decided 2013 will finally be the year I get my act together and get myself a decent credit score. I've made past mistakes in college, but thankfully most of them have gone away. The main things hampering my credit now are high utilization, a series of lates on my student loans, and a past judgment for which I was never served. I really want to finally be able to say that I have good credit. As far as I know, my score has never seen 700. From here on out I want to manage my credit responsibly.
My goals for 2013 are:
1. Pay down my credit card debt by August (about 3K).
2. Get my first prime credit card (I'm eyeing Chase Freedom and/or Discover It)
3. Get a car loan at a decent rate for my very first car.
4. Aggressively pay down my private student loans (about 34K private, 76K total)
I've learned so much reading the forums and I know this year will be a great year when it comes to money and my credit. Thanks for being so helpful.
Congratulations on your sobriety and kicking gamling. Your goals are very realistic and obtainable. You can find a lot of knowledge here on this forumn from people that have been through the same things that you are going through. Good luck on your journey.
Nikki
Wow...haven't been this excited about a new year in about 5 yrs! I've worked really hard to get my score up from 580 in 2011 to 685 now. If I can do it, anyone can! My goal is low 720's by end of 2013, and get a house in 2014! I really wish all of you the best of luck, and for those of you in despair (like I was in 2011), just know that if you take small steps, you CAN do it! I had to grow up a little and be responsible. Lol ;-)
Good luck!
I am desperatley trying to raise my score up within the next 3 months so I can buy a house for me and my family. Icurrently will be paying off everything that I owe in collections this week. I am ready for this challenge and any insight will be very helpful for me.
My Goal is to reach at least 800 across the board!
FICO is currently 770 - Transunion is only 743
Got myself into a credit nightmare when I was younger. I had a bunch of medical/utilies go to collection, which doesn't seem too bad but I didn't obtain any credit prior to that. I let everything drop off, obtained some secured loans through my CU, have some school loans that are currently deferred and recently got approved for small toy credit lines. My boyfriend and I hope to buy a house six months after I graduate. My boyfriend is also in the rebuilding mode, and recently got approved for a car payment at 5% (last car purchase for him was 17%, so this is great news)! We both started lower than 520... I think we may even have been in the 400's, I'd check, cry and try to forget about it instead of taking action. He's at 680 now, and I am in the 650's!
So nice to hear credit can be repaired. Question: Does paying off collections help? A mojority of them are medical bills for my daughter and set to fall off in two years., How far back should I pay off in regards to collection accounts?
So, here I am. I'm in my late 20s, struggling to get by financially with a low-income job. I have a college degree, but have been unable to really start my career because there are no jobs in my field in the area and I don't have the money to move to greener pastures.
However, in spite of all of this I have fairly good credit, because even when times are tight I've always paid my bills on time. I've never had an account in collections, there are no liens or judgements against me. I've missed a utility bill once or twice, but nothing so late that it would get reported to a credit bureau. I owe a lot of money in student loans, and am just now trying to push my credit beyond what those loans give me in terms of a credit history. I got approved for my first credit card ever, a DCU secured card (credit limit $500), back in November. I had applied for unsecured cards before, but never approved because of my income, even for retail cards with sky-high interest rates.
I needed to buy a new computer in January, and decided I had nothing to lose applying for PayPal''s Bill Me Later service for the deferred financing offer on the parts I was buying from Newegg and was shocked when they actually approved me! I then kind of went on an application binge over the month of January, adding another six credit cards to my wallet from various retail stores. The euphoria of actually being approved for credit wore off fast enough, but fortunately I didn't really put any substantial balances on any of them.
All those applications did have the effect of dropping my credit score from around 735 down to around 700. My Experian score was hit particularly hard, because a lot of the companies I applied for credit with use Experian for their underwriting.
Still, I feel accomplished; I went from having no cards to having total available credit of around $10k in the span of two months. My main priority now is to let the damage all those inquiries did heal (allowing my credit score to rise back up into the 730s again) and hope that the addition of revolving debt into my credit mix pushes my score even higher into the 750s or 760s. My secondary goal for my credit is to get a "real" unsecured credit card by the end of 2013. By this, I mean a card like Discover It or the Chase Freedom card where interest rates are considerably less than the 20%+ rates on the retail cards. (My DCU card has only 11.5%, but, hey, it's a secured card.)
I'm kind of a newbie in terms of all of this; what do you all think? Are these goals realistically achievable by the end of 2013?
@Anonymous wrote:So nice to hear credit can be repaired. Question: Does paying off collections help? A mojority of them are medical bills for my daughter and set to fall off in two years., How far back should I pay off in regards to collection accounts?
The short answer is no unless they agreed to delete. For more info and steps you can take to improve your scores and things you can do to get rid of these collections, check out the Rebuilding Your Credit board within these forums.