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Hello all,
This is my first post but I've been hanging around since about February. There's a ton of good information here for free so Kudos to all of you guys. I have been separated from my wife for the last year. We were together for seven years. Instead of focusing on building my credit at that time, I subscribed to the as long as one of us has good credit theory. So everything was in her name and she has around a 725 fico. I on the other hand was at about 499 last October. Nobody to blame but myself so that's that. I had to buy a car and of course I got a terrible rate. So it was at that point when I decided enough was enough and tried to start cleaning things up. I paid off an old Gold's gym membership $88, and two or three medical collections that were between $60 and $100. That got my score up to about to about 540 or so on Experian. I knew I needed to open up some secured cards to get things rolling. I thought that I was applying for the secured version of the Citi card. I guess I either got turned down for it or hit the button for the unsecured by accident. So I opened up a discover secured and a Cap one secured. This was all in February. I also did the shopping cart trick and got approved for an Express Next card and a VS Angel card (lmao, single man with a VS card). So the two store cards and Discover have been reporting and my scores saw a bump up to 612 Ex 612 EQ 584 Tu. I was trying to use the AZEO method and zeroed out all of my cards and left the Cap One with a balance of $20. Everything reported but the Cap One card. I lost 20 points for having the 3 cards all report zero. My Cap One card has been through two statements already and hasn't shown up on any of the bureaus. Does it usually take this long? This is what I have:
Cap One secured: $20 out of $300 limit
Discover It secured: 0 out of $200 limit
Victoria Secrets: 0 out of $250 limit
Express Next: 0 out of $250 limit
The one baddie that I have left on my report is a collection from Jefferson Cap. It was originally for a car financed with Consumer Portfolio Services. The CPS account is showing 0 balance but all the late payments are listed. I made an arrangement for a payment plan with Jefferson Cap and they sent a letter saying that they would remove the collection once I made the final payment in May. So I expect that to give me a little boost. But will the original CPS account stay on my credit? Or should I try to dispute that once the collection is paid off. Thanks in advance for your help.
the original account will stay on your reports, disputing it will only cause it to update and potentially lower your score
From what I can remember, my Cap One CC took around two months to report.
Ok thank you for the information. I will not dispute the account once the collection is paid off. It's good to know that the Cap one account should report soon if it's around the two month time frame. I could use those points back. Thanks for all of your help.
Thanks for sharing.
I'm interested in knowing what happens to your score after Cap1 reports. I'm new to this AZEO method. When I starting rebuilding my credit from having no credit, I left all my cards with a zero balance and my credit scores still grew.