March 2019 Check-In Thread

[Kenny]

I'm sure you are all hard at work with your credit goals.  Have you progressed as far as you hoped?  Were there any unforseen expenses that cropped up and may have thrown you off schedule?

As a reminder, participation in these monthly checkins is optional, but encouraged. The goal is to help keep you on track, so feel free to post your progress updates here. This is a no-judge zone; feel free to say what's keeping you up at night or give yourself a kudo for having it all together.

Did you hit any potholes or speedbumps? Achieve some milestones, either small or mighty? Change your goals or add new ones?

Let us know how you're doing!

[CramEiko]

Check. Staying the course.... For now....... 

Good Luck All!

[Anonymous]

Goal updates for 2019.

1. Maxing out 2018 IRA.DONE

2. Max out 2019 IRA. (6k)

3. Get my emergency savings where I want . DONE (may up my desired amount)

4. Save enough extra to max 2020 IRA on Jan 1, 2020. (6k) Continue to try to hit max IRA on day 1 into the future.

5. No additional cards in 2019. (0% AMEX BCE thru 2019) Good Here

6. Continue PIF statement balance on all cards except 0% rates.Good Here

7. Dispute 1 HP that was fraudulent and dispute lates from student loans that I received forbearances during the timeframe of lates.

8. Get my net worth to be a non-negative number. (have never been positive since college)

[Anonymous]

Whew! I made it! 😁

My scores are slowly moving up. I added more cards last month and am now up to 5. I don't intend on obtaining anymore.
I currently have:
FedEx Credit Union Secured (hate it)

Discover It Secured (love it)

NFCU

Quicksilver One (meh)

DCU Platinum (meh)

I plan to get rid of FedEx in a year. I would eventually like an Amex but am okay for now.
Finally got my student loans to report 100% payment history correctly across all bureaus.

I still have one derogatory on each bureau report. Working on those.

I have received a new collection letter from an agency regarding school tuition but I used loans to cover everything and those are current so I need to call them. 😬

Okay! That's where we're at.

Happy March!!!!!

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Goal updates for 2019.

1. Maxing out 2018 IRA.DONE

2. Max out 2019 IRA. (6k)

3. Get my emergency savings where I want . DONE (may up my desired amount)

4. Save enough extra to max 2020 IRA on Jan 1, 2020. (6k) Continue to try to hit max IRA on day 1 into the future.

5. No additional cards in 2019. (0% AMEX BCE thru 2019) Good Here

6. Continue PIF statement balance on all cards except 0% rates.Good Here

7. Dispute 1 HP that was fraudulent and dispute lates from student loans that I received forbearances during the timeframe of lates.

8. Get my net worth to be a non-negative number. (have never been positive since college)

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For #7 student loan lates. I had this issue to and tried so many times with letters to ask they adjust it. They NEVER would. Finally I went into my CR and copied down all the account numbers and dates I obtained them that the loan servicer had in their possession at the same time as the two accounts that showed 90 day lates and told them that these other 8 accounts that were being serviced by them at the same time as the two with lates were all show no lates due to forbearance. I asked them to please adjust the mistakenly reported lates due to this information. FINALLY they did. I got a letter last month showing they were correcting all improperly reported lates. Maybe try that route if your others have not been successful. Good luck!

[Anonymous]

Hello all,

February was a decent month. Raised morgage scores by about 30pts. Raised FICO 8 scores by about 20pts. 

March:

1) Continue to pay off CCs to get Total Uti to >8.99% and all cards reporting 0 except 1. My report date for two cards that are not going to be paid to $0 is the 20th of March. I want to have those both at 30% uti. I paid $900 in CC balances down this week and will be paying down another $900 next week. The final $900 is between the last two cards. I expect to be able to pay $600 of that off before statement close date. This means for April reporting everything should look much much nicer. 

2) See a new LO in April. 

3) After credit card balances report I will see where I am with our 1 join collection. After we meet with a LO I will see if that has to be paid or if we can skeet by without paying it. I don't agree with the balance and the CA is just awful. 

4) Get a new collection that reported on me removed with GW letters. (Got it removed from EX and my mortgage score went up 82 pts from it- believe this is the biggest reason my mortgage scores are so low- reason 2- high UTI) Between paying down UTI and the collection coming off my EX report my EX score went up a total of 114pts in February. This gave me all the motivation I needed to get this collection gone from EQ and TU as well. 

 5) I am trying to get closed $0 balance charge offs/collections removed from EQ and TU that are not reporting on EX. I have 5 on EQ- 4 on TU- 2 on EX. 

[calyx]

Hello all!

Feb ended pretty good.  I ended up financing something I hadn't expected to, so I took a minor hit on my scores for that.  Other than that, not much happened.

So far, on Mar1:

• I asked for and recieved EEs from TU, which jumped my scores up 60+ points!  Huzzah!
• I "built" the next rung in my CD latter/emergency fund

For the rest of March:

• I just want to see how the new finance account reports before on deciding on any further credit apps or accounts
  OOPS!   Applied and approved for a Chase account.  Will post more when I have all the DPs
• Increase my USBank limit by $500 (it's secured, and I think it'll graduate without too much issue in August or September),
  Got a hard pull from USBank yesterday (I knew it was possible,  but I was hoping that wouldn't happen).  The good news is that they pulled TU, which is my clean report, now I'm just waiting for the accounts to clear.
• Send a letter to EX trying for an early early-exclusion and if that fails, just wait out the proper EE time (April)
  Got that done, now it's just wait and see.
• Join NFCU (just to start a relationship in case I want to take advantage of/need any products from them)

As for the rest - I'm still on target for paying $10k on my student loans, and my goal for 2019 was to hit 740, so I'm looking good for it.  
Last year when I started building, I was hoping to hit 680 by 9/2019.   I'm so stoked on how well everything is going!

[GApeachy]

Checking in too.....I think I have done pretty good trying app's and cli's but don't want to do anymore than that.  Just need time.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hello all,

February was a decent month. Raised morgage scores by about 30pts. Raised FICO 8 scores by about 20pts. 

March:

1) Continue to pay off CCs to get Total Uti to >8.99% and all cards reporting 0 except 1. My report date for two cards that are not going to be paid to $0 is the 20th of March. I want to have those both at 30% uti. I paid $900 in CC balances down this week and will be paying down another $900 next week. The final $900 is between the last two cards. I expect to be able to pay $600 of that off before statement close date. This means for April reporting everything should look much much nicer. 

2) See a new LO in April. 

3) After credit card balances report I will see where I am with our 1 join collection. After we meet with a LO I will see if that has to be paid or if we can skeet by without paying it. I don't agree with the balance and the CA is just awful. 

4) Get a new collection that reported on me removed with GW letters. (Got it removed from EX and my mortgage score went up 82 pts from it- believe this is the biggest reason my mortgage scores are so low- reason 2- high UTI) Between paying down UTI and the collection coming off my EX report my EX score went up a total of 114pts in February. This gave me all the motivation I needed to get this collection gone from EQ and TU as well.  I got a creditkarma notification today that this collection was removed from TU and EQ. Which is awesome since it was "updated and verified" when i disputed it 2 weeks ago. For some reason it got removed. No idea why. Not sure what to do about it but I am happy. 

 5) I am trying to get closed $0 balance charge offs/collections removed from EQ and TU that are not reporting on EX. I have 5 on EQ- 4 on TU- 2 on EX.  I got a notification from creditkarma today as well that two of my $0 balance accounts were removed. One from EQ and a different one from TU. 

I am waiting for MyFICO to update with these so I can see the actual impact on my credit score. Creditkarma usually is wrong with the score impact. Getting 2 collections on each (TU and EQ) removed should have a bigger impact than 1-3 pts. When I look at the report from creditkarma it still shows the derogatory account still listed that was supposed to have been removed according to my alert. Will have to wait and see for verification. 

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[Kkwillletyouknow]

1. Goal is to sail into the 700s by summer and buy a new house.
2. Purchase home by the summer
3. Refi student loans
4. Develop better repayment strategy

I’ve reached the gardening stage. Scores are at 676 across the board and I need a combo of good payment history and time to increase my scores incrementally.

I’ll be purchasing a car as soon as I find the one that makes sense. Financing through NFCU approved.

Lodged a complaint with my student loan calculation with the ombudsman