I'm new to tracking my FICO. After a divorce, I did probably every thing possible to make it worse unintentionally. It was a pretty nasty divorce, where she fought for all the assetts and none of the debts. So after a year of me paying everything and her just taking more and more, I stopped paying anything. I cancelled my credit cards that had decent sized limits, and after the divorce opened a couple of very small limit cards that I paid off monthly, but usually showed up as 80% or more utilization. I owned 3 vehicles outright. And hadn't had a vehicle loan in 6 years. I had two collections on my report that were incorrect. One of them had in the notes that it was 0 balance due to a bankruptcy. I have never declared bankruptcy.
When I started looking at my credit, it was with Credit Karma. I didn't understand the difference in Vantage and FICO. My vantage was about 530. CK helped me understand the utilization issues with my cards. So I paid off the cards I had, I opened two other cards with a little higher limit to get the available limit up to 4000. When I paid off the oldest card, they closed the account. I made the payment in the same month my new debit card came in. Same number, but a new expiration date. When I got the email from them that the payment didn't clear I called in. They took the payment over the phone with the updated info, and said the response they got from the bank was it was an invalid account. I pointed out it was the exact same number, only a new expiration. They still closed the account dispite me never having missed a payment with them.
I took out a car loan. I'm not sure what my FICO was then, but seeing as it's always lower than the Vantage score I see on CK, I'm guessing it was 500 or lower.
I'm working with Lexington Law, they've gotten the two collections removed from all three agencies. I'm going to keep requesting CLI with the Credit One cards I have. And once my scores are over 680, I'm going to try for a mortgage. At this point, the only issues with my credit report is old late pays and the age of my accounts. So I guess it's all a waiting game now.
