Need to clean up credit in order to buy a house

[Anonymous]

Hello! Here's the deal. I am a mess with my credit. I have tried time and time again to pay things off. These items were from WAY back. I went through a divorce and since then I think my score is maybe at a 300. I have attempted to contact the creditors and I either get, we do not have that account, I don't see you have a debt with us, or I get a phone number that has been disconnected. At this point I am wondering how to get these things paid. I seem to be going around in circles here and think that maybe the best route is a bankruptcy. I don't want to hurt myself anymore but I do not know how to handle this. Any suggestions? My husband and I are living in a house that we are currently renting and we want to buy it. The landlord wants to sell it to us but we don't know what to do.

edited to provide new thread title after splitting this post off from another --hauling

[GoodCredBen]

Wrong forum - Most of all are 620 (at LEAST for FHA)  though 

note: I had just moved this thread from elsewhere and had not yet changed the title. The post seems to be dealing more with how to clean up credit in order to buy a house, so it's on this board for now. --hauling

[haulingthescoreup]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hello! Here's the deal. I am a mess with my credit. I have tried time and time again to pay things off. These items were from WAY back. I went through a divorce and since then I think my score is maybe at a 300. I have attempted to contact the creditors and I either get, we do not have that account, I don't see you have a debt with us, or I get a phone number that has been disconnected. At this point I am wondering how to get these things paid. I seem to be going around in circles here and think that maybe the best route is a bankruptcy. I don't want to hurt myself anymore but I do not know how to handle this. Any suggestions? My husband and I are living in a house that we are currently renting and we want to buy it. The landlord wants to sell it to us but we don't know what to do.

edited to provide new thread title after splitting this post off from another --hauling

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Hi, welcome to the forums!

The first thing that you need to do is find out what your FICO scores are and what your reports look like, instead of guessing. You won't know where to start otherwise.

The simplest way is to buy your EQ (Equifax) and TU (TransUnion) FICO scores here. The TU version here is a bit out of date, but considering where you're starting from, that's not a big issues. EX (Experian) won't let consumers buy our own FICO scores, so unless you get yours from a lender or from a credit union in Pennsylvania called PSEU, any Experian "score" that you see is a FAKO.

If you buy your scores here, be sure to save them to disk and/or print them out. The Standard version only stays up for 30-40 days or so and then it's gone.

If you don't want to pay for both, buy your EQ FICO here.

Once you have your report(s), post a summary here, without listing account names and numbers, as to what you've got. ESPECIALLY post screen two, the positives and negatives. The negatives are what are hurting your scores; the positives are mostly warm fuzzies.

eta: And if you decide to buy a credit monitoring service that also gives you "scores" from all three bureaus, these scores are NOT FICO's, period. Nothing wrong with FAKO scores for entertainment, but they aren't what your lenders pull, and there's been a lot of heartbreak when consumers find this out too late.