Hi everyone - first post!
My wife and I are currently rebuilding and I've been lurking on these forums for a while. I wanted to make a post to ask a couple questions but to also share our story and get some insight on how we're fixing it.
It's been about a 5 year or so process for us, but towards the former end of those 5 years we ran into a lot of trouble with our mortgage and one of our two car loans (we finance one, lease another). We twice got behind on our mortgage (4+ months) and so behind on the financed car that it was repo'ed. We paid the balances on our mortgage without any foreclosure and settled with the auto loan holder so the car was returned within about 48 hours. I'm happy to say with being much more mindful and keeping nearly everything on auto-pay, we are nearing 2 solid years without any late/missed payments on anything.
We have no traditional credit cards, only a Best Buy store card (Citibank) that typically carries a very low or $0 balance month-to-month. If we use it we normally only do so to capture rewards dollars and then pay the balance almost immediately. For any actual loans, the only things I can think of that we have is our mortgage, one financed vehicle, and one leased vehicle. I have a relatively small amount of student loans ($8K) that have been paused since the pandemic started, my wife has no loans.
I wonder if we are in a weird situation, because if I'm brutally honest - we make a lot of money, we are both employed FT in relatively well earning jobs and our combined gross income is about $175,000. I like to think of this as "high" as we have no kids, our mortgage is only about 200K, and we live in a somewhat low cost of living state (New Hampshire - I'm comparing to other northeastern states). It is absolutely our fault we ever got into issues with credit in the first place, we certainly have the cash - we just didn't have the maturity/responsibiliy to pay the bills on time.
I'm not sure what our lowest credit score was when we got into the trouble described above, if I'm honest I was probably too nervous to look at it and just chose to pay the debts and ignore it. I have recently started to take a peek and from what/how I am viewing it, it does seem to be slowly rising. So, here's where my questions come in:
1.) What is the best way to actually view my credit score? Right now, I am looking at it through my auto-loan holder which provides a view of my FICO score every 90 days (it says the data is "pulled from Experian"). I am as of right now at 644 (I'm not sure where my wife is at, typically anything we've ever had is under my name with maybe her as a co-signer, mortgage is in both our names. I would imagine her score is higher than mine, if at all possible). The method will provide me an updated glance on 7/5.
2.) From where I'm standing now - are there any mainstream credit cards that are possible for me to obtain? I saw a post on here recently that said Discover might be a good option and to try pre-approvals. The card is honestly to have as the one "on file" for hotel check-ins, we normally provide our debit cards when this is needed when traveling, but some hotels are reluctant/abrasive about accepting debit cards for incidentals, in our experience. We're traveling later this year and are hoping to have something in our wallets to make this easier, we're not looking to make any purchases.
To be honest, so far our rebuilding path has essentially led us to just pay the bills on time, not open or attempt to open any accounts/CCs/loans (2 years since any hard pulls whatsoever), and to simply just wait. I'm not sure if this is a bad route to be on, but I'm not sure if it's the most productive? I wanted to ask for any insight anyone might have, it is certainly appreciated!
Thank you!
