@WarthogWrangler wrote:
Hello everyone, I'm excited to announce that I'm finally in the 700 club! And I accomplished it with 8 charge off and a seriously late mortgage still on my profile. One of the questions I saw asked in the "Aks the fico experts thread" was if 700 was possible with charge off and lates still on your profile. Well I'm proof that it is!
2 years ago I was sitting at 540 across the board. 8 charge offs with balances reporting, and a mortgage that at one point was 150 days or more late. I decided it was time to take action and get my credit life back into shape. First order of business was getting my mortgage back on track. I sold one of my vehicles and got it caught up. I then made it a priority to never let it go late again. Second order of business was to get an open credit card so I applied and was approved for a USAA secured card which I opened for $350. I used that card for three months and paid in full before the statement each month. Then I found this forum, and things got serious. I checked Cap One for a prequal and was qualified for a Platinum card. I applied and got it for $300. At this point my scores had risen to 560 across the board due to current mortgage and an open credit card.
I used my USAA and new Cap One card for 6 months, always paying in full before the statement date and letting 0 balance report. Scores crept up to the 570-580 range but I had 8 chargeoff reporting balances that were really suppressing my scores. In Jan of 2019 I applied for another Cap One card and was approved for a Quicksilver with $1000 limit. At the same time I used the Auto navigator tool to prequal for an autoloan and was shocked that they approved me for $50,000 at 7.5%. I went out an got myself a nice vehicle or $25k and started paying on that. Over the course of the next year my scores crept up to the low 600s-620s where they stalled. I figured there was no way to go up until I took care of the charge offs with balances. Two months ago I took the plunge and applied for a personal loan with PenFed. Again, I was shocked that they approved me for a $15k personal loan at a decent rate, not great but I can live with it for now. I used that loan to contact every single one of my charged off creditors and negotiated settlements. I was able to pay all of them off at about 30-40% of what I owed on them. As the charged off accounts started to report current and zero balance my scores skyrocketed!! And today I'm sitting at Ex 705 - EQ 715 and TU - 708!
For some data points, my average age of accounts is 6 years 1 month. My mortgage is my oldest account at 12 years and I have three accounts less than a year old now. 7-12 inquiries across the board and I now have $15k of credit and keep it under 3% reporting each month using the AZEO method. I still have 8 charge offs reporting but all are zero balance and my mortgage still has the 150 days or more lates on it with my last late being 2 years and 3 months ago.
I hope this helps some of you in my situation not to lose hope. 700's are possible and can be done even with a pretty dirty file! Now I just have to wait two more years for all the charge offs to dissapear completely. I'd like to thank everyone here for the help and advice I've gotten over the last couple years.
@WarthogWrangler congratulations and well done! I would definitely like to ask a few questions to gain knowledge for the community.
Might I ask how long was it from the time you paid the last chargeoff and it updated to zero until you were able to hit 700? You did say none of them were regularly updating, correct? so I'm assuming on some of them you saw gains and some you saw losses?
did you keep track of the details and if so could you share them? It would be great to know for each chargeoff, how long it had been since it had updated and also the amounts owed and reported credit limits for each and score change for each. Would also be good to know what percentage of your aggregate credit limit each was.
thanks for advance for any information and data points. We're trying to learn how charge-offs affect utilization exactly.
