Newbie here...and I need HELP!!

[Anonymous]

Ive recently been studying all 3 reports for my husband.  It has started out on a really bad foot and got a little better, but dropped again today.  Let me give you some background.

He was active duty military forever, and was medically retired last year.  Prior to retiring, we received orders to Camp Lejeune.  No biggie there.  While stationed at Cherry Point, I worked for a Dodge dealer, and ended up purchasing many cars just to trade within a year.  At that time, we had very good credit, paid off the most of our credit card balances monthly, left probably 100 dollars on them.  Once receiving orders, I had to find another job and would up having alot of cards charged off.  This was from 2006 to present.  As of Sept, I paid around 10K of debt off. Some  have reported, some havent and some have reported 0 but leaving it as an open collections account.  His credit score with equifax went up to a measly 513 last week, but today it plummeted to 481.  I dont know whats going on with it.  When I pull a 3 in 1 with transunion it reports equifax as a 575.  Why such a differnce??  and why did it go down after paying all those off????

HELP!!!!!  I really want to start building a house soon, and its not gonna happen with scores like this!!!

[athensguy]

Please read at least the first post of Credit Scoring 101.

http://ficoforums.myfico.com/fico/board/message?board.id=ficoscoring&thread.id=29793

Edited to repair CS101 link

Message Edited by llecs on 11-26-2008 03:41 PM

[marty56]

If you pulled your scores from the TU site, they are FAKO scores and dont count.  You need to get your real FICO scores here so you have a basis to start from.  If your CC util is reported as 0, you will loose points.  I get the best result when I have 1% to 9 % total util reporting on 1 card.

[MattH]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Ive recently been studying all 3 reports for my husband.  It has started out on a really bad foot and got a little better, but dropped again today.  Let me give you some background.

He was active duty military forever, and was medically retired last year.  Prior to retiring, we received orders to Camp Lejeune.  No biggie there.  While stationed at Cherry Point, I worked for a Dodge dealer, and ended up purchasing many cars just to trade within a year.  At that time, we had very good credit, paid off the most of our credit card balances monthly, left probably 100 dollars on them.  Once receiving orders, I had to find another job and would up having alot of cards charged off.  This was from 2006 to present.  As of Sept, I paid around 10K of debt off. Some  have reported, some havent and some have reported 0 but leaving it as an open collections account.  His credit score with equifax went up to a measly 513 last week, but today it plummeted to 481.  I dont know whats going on with it.  When I pull a 3 in 1 with transunion it reports equifax as a 575.  Why such a differnce??  and why did it go down after paying all those off????

HELP!!!!!  I really want to start building a house soon, and its not gonna happen with scores like this!!!

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First, as others have posted, buy your scores from myfico.com and not elsewhere because most other sites give only what are known on this board as FAKOs rather than the actual FICO scores.  Second, after purchasing FICO scores, there is a tool called the Score Simulator that lets you ask "what if" type questions: if I did X, what might happen to my score N months from now?  Since the simulator starts from an existing history as a baseline, you need to purchase at least one score to use it.