A lot of people don't have a good grasp of causality and mistakenly assume that doing X led to Y when there may have been other factors at play. It's can also be further complicated by a lack of understanding the scoring factors and other matters related to credit. If you haven't read this then start here:
http://www.myfico.com/crediteducation/whatsinyourscore.aspx
Paying a derog can acutally hurt scores if it makes the account recently active so one should always carefully research when rebuilding. This site does have a Rebuilding suboforum and I recommend using it as a resource as well as other resources on rebuilding credit.
@Anonymous wrote:
Now how do I get them to come back up again..apply for more loans or cards that I dont want and put myself deeper in debt?
Impossible to say without knowing the details of your credit. All we can say is that if you have derogs then you need to address them as they will tend to hold you back as long as you have them reporting. You need to ensure that you're building positive payment history. If you can''t budget and stick to it then you'll need to work on that as well to make any progress. Manage your revolving utilization as it is a significant risk factor.
Available credit and debt are two entirely different things but if having available credit is a risk because you'll just use it then, again, work on learning to stick to a budget and control your available credit until you can responsibly manage it. You don't have to incur debt on your cards to build your credit. Work on fixing your issues first and then look into ading tradelines if they would be of benefit to you.
Definitely read up more so you understand how various activity impacts your scores. And don't rely on monitoring alerts to determine the reasons for score changes. Make sure you're carefully comparing reports before and after the scores change to understand all changes that led to the increase/decrease. Alerts are only triggered for certain activity. Better yet, once you've learned how the various factors affect your scores, don't obsess over the numbers and focus on the data in your reports. Any score is generated based on data in a report. A good report will lead to a good score.
I know that's just a high level overview but you do have to do the legwork yourself. That said, people here are happy to help out.
