My journey to credit repair starts NOW!!!!

[futurehomeowner?]

Thanks all. I was going to do an update on the 1st but we were on vacation and by the time I realized it was like the 11th so I figured I would just wait until Sept. There isn't a whole lot to report but there are a few things. I will probably do my update on the week of the 1st because we will be busy labor day weekend.

[kls0654]

Any Update ?

 

We would like to hear from you

[futurehomeowner?]

6 Month Update

Man o Man, I am on this website everyday but I just can't get myself to update this thread. For some reason I have become lazy, not only on here but on other things too. I am going to blame it on having an 18 month old and a pregnant wife. ;-) OK OK, its all me, so I am going to start today and get back on track with everything. I am about a month behind where I should be but we still have progress.

 

A little update on our credit situation:

DW

-1 Judgement with Midland. I have been sending letters to them and getting ignored but thanks to another thread I have finally made contact with their attorney and are actively working out a deal. I have been meaning to send them a letter but my above mentioned laziness has prevailed.

-11 AES late 90 day lates from 2008. I have worked every possible angle on this and have pretty much just given up. She is over 5 years from the lates now so the impact is getting to be less and less all the time.

-HSBC C/O that was sent to collections in 2008, it is showing on her report as transferred with a $0 balance.

-We added 5 cards in the last 2 months so she now has 8 open TL's

-She has 6 inquiries that will mostly be gone by the end of the year.

-Util is currently 18%

Her starting FICO 612 Todays FICO 708

 

ME

-I still have 8 negative items on my CR, however all negative items are set to fall off between 02/14 and 09/14. Because of this I am not going to spend a ton of time fighting with CRA's. I am going to start disputing things as obsolete in November.

-5 new TL's in the last 2 months.

-Util is currently 22%

Starting FICO 538, Todays FICO 605

 

GOALS BY APRIL

Pay off DWs judgment

Get the rest of my negatives removed due to obsolete

UTIL under 10%

GET PRE APPROVAL FOR NEW HOME

 

THOUGHTS

I truly can not believe how far we have come in just 6 months. I honestly do not know where we would be today if I never found this website. I have had quite a few items removed from both of our reports in the last 6 months. We have NOT paid 1 single penny to a CA during this journey which is awesome. The only person we are going to pay is the CA that holds the judgment. I am very lucky that all of my negatives are going to disappear in less than year. I can't image the jump that I will get in my FICO when everything falls off. Originally we were shooting for 620 to qualify for an FHA loan but now we are dreaming of a 720 to go conventional. Only time will tell at this point.

Edited September 10, 2013 by futurehomeowner?

[kls0654]

Thanks for your updates

[Dnyce]

Awesome job futurehomeowner, good job and keep up the good work.

[futurehomeowner?]

OCT UPDATE

 

not much to update over the last month. At least nothing that I am allowed to talk about. I have re ordered hard copies of all our reports. I have a lot of COs that are set to fall off in March and April so I am going to start working the obsolete dispute through TU and then in December I will work EQ and EX.

 

Thats about it for this month. I just wanted to make sure I kept a monthly log up.

[Swagger07]

Congrats on the progress!

[Nickspen13]

Any update??? Great read so fr

[futurehomeowner?]

Man, these months go by so quickly. I will do a quick update either tonight when my son goes to bed or tomorrow.

edit to add update:
Well I was going to wait until he went to bed but he is eating a snack so I have a few minutes. This is the month that I have been waiting for. When I formulated my plan, part of it was to wait until November and I could get a good chunk of the 2014 ones removed. I sent out 3 obsolete disputes to TU a few weeks ago and they have all been removed already. I sent out another letter with 4 more obsolete disputes today. On During the last week of this month I plan on sending out a few more. I am leaving EX and EQ go until the first of the year since they don't remove as early as TU. By March 2014 my TU should be completely clean.

 

My wife still only has 1 baddie other than the impossible student loans. I feel that I have them on a few violations. I talked to my lawyer that handled another case but he has been slow to get back to me so I am going to talk to another one. The violations I have are calling an unauthorized cell phone, leaving a message on my cell phone, and robo calling. If I can successfully fight these then I have a chance of getting the judgment removed. If those fail we are prepared to pay it off and her report will be complete. It won't be clean but it will be as clean as it can be and clean enough for a mortgage.

Edited November 7, 2013 by futurehomeowner?

[futurehomeowner?]

I am now down to 3 baddies on TU. I am sending out an obsolete dispute tomorrow and also a dispute for an old progressive insurance bill. I sent a DV to the CA and they responded by saying they have sent it back to progressive and I should contact them. However, they never actually removed the account from TU. It is not on EX or EQ. After I get these 2 removed I will only have 1 baddy left on TU which is my car loan that I discussed on the first page. It is set to fall off Sept of next year so I will try an obsolete at the end of Jan. Once I get these 2 removed I am going to battle with EQ and EX. They each have 6 baddies but are all due to fall off early 2014 except for my car.

 

We received another auto CLI on Walmart, Merrick, and TR. I still have not received any type of collection phone calls in at least 90 days. It is such a relief that when my phone rings it is actually someone calling to talk to me instead of badger me. I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving.

[futurehomeowner?]

A worthwhile update for me. Because of some proceeds from a before mentioned thing, I have been able to pay down all credit lines to 2.99% util. We are now up to a combined $20059 in credit lines and only have $600 that will be reporting between all cards. We were at approx 38% util before today so I will be very interested to see what effect this has once everything reports.

[futurehomeowner?]

2013 YEAR IN REVIEW

I came to this site in early 2013 with no hopes and a depressing financial future. After 1 day on here I felt like our future had hope. After 30 days I was able to get a few things going in the right direction and now after almost a year I am in the position to look forward to buying a house this year. I also feel like I am in the position to help out others with some things. Here are just a few things that I have been able to fight this year.

- I have not received a call about debt in a handful of months, including those payday loan people that I thought would never go away

- We have gone from a few small credit cards with high balances to 12 cards with under 10% utilization.

- I fought a big JDB and won

- I have had approx 17 TL's removed without paying 1 dime

 

2014 GOALS

Our ultimate goal is to own a house. Originally the plan was to make this happen by April of 14 but there is one baddie that may put a damper on that. We should still be ok around June and at the very latest September. Once we are in the house we want to get a few higher limit cards that we can sock drawer for emergency purposes and maybe 1 good rewards card. Our current credit lines total 22k so I would like to get that up to 50k including the new cards.

 

MONTHLY UPDATE

My credit: I have been working very hard on TU getting some removed early as well as getting a few utilities removed. I only have 1 left on TU which is my car loan that is scheduled to fall off in Sept. I am sending out an obsolete dispute today to see if I can get lucky. It may be a little early for that but it is worth a try. I am also going to start working on EX and EQ this month. I have a bunch that are scheduled to fall off in March and April so I am going to attack those.

My Wife: The only attackable baddy that she has left is a judgement. She does have a few student loans lates that are not going anywhere and she also has a late on a closed JC Penney card that they are refusing to remove. Last week I hired a lawyer to go after the judgment. It was a default one and he claims there is an error in their original paperwork which gives him grounds to petition the court to reopen the case. Once he gets the judgment thrown out he is going to fight it against Midland. This is going to cost us $500 in total so hopefully he succeeds or it will be money down the drain. We will owe over 2k for the judgment if he cant get it removed. Before hiring him I tried working a settlement with them and they would not accept anything less than full payment so I feel this is a good risk to take.

Edited January 1, 2014 by futurehomeowner?

[CTAmigo]

Congrats! I plan to purchase a house next year, and have been reading forums for ideas on how to attack my CRs. Dec 1st I had 19 baddies reporting, I successfully had two removed and recently paid two settlements which will improve my utilization! Hang in there!

 

 

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[nikkii]

Wishing you lots of luck on the getting the judgment removed! I am in the exact situation. I was going to try and fight my judgment with Capital One in court on my own, but I will hire an attorney instead since vacating default judgments are so difficult.

[bkchild78]

I was under the impression Jefferson Capital was no longer operating with all the trouble they were in. I remember dealing with them in 2009 and had ran into several FTC suits against them. They were very easy to remove once I sent a DV to them directly, they removed it and when I called to check on the DV they said it was still in "legal dispute" but would not be reported back to my credit file. Then I never heard from them again.

Edited January 27, 2014 by Gianichole

[futurehomeowner?]

JANUARY UPDATE

I can not believe that next month will be 1 year already that I have been working on my credit. This month I disputed my last baddie on TU as obsolete. I am still waiting to here from TU but I don't have high hopes. It is not scheduled to fall off until Sept of this year but I wanted to give it a try. I started the month with 2 baddies left on EX and EQ. I was able to get 1 removed from EQ due to obsolete and are still waiting to hear from EX regarding my dispute.

 

As mentioned last month we hired a lawyer to go after the default judgment. The first hearing is set on Friday of this week coming up. I think this is the important one. The lawyer filed a motion to throw out the default judgment because of original paperwork was not filed correctly. If the judge throws out the judgment then I should be able to get it removed from her reports. If that succeeds he is going to defend her in court against Midland. He told be that he has never lost against Midland and generally they just drop the case once you are represented. Hopefully Friday goes well.

[mustanger]

Good Luck on your journey. I hope to rebuild my credit as well.

[futurehomeowner?]

Good Luck on your journey. I hope to rebuild my credit as well.

 

Good luck on yours as well. Just remember 1 thing. It took me years to mess up my credit so I couldn't expect it to be fixed overnight.

[futurehomeowner?]

1 YEAR UPDATE

 

This month marks the 1 year mark since I started my repair. You can see from my signature our starting FICOs were in the 500s. If you have followed my story at all you will know that we had many collections, a charged off car, default judgment, and no hopes for owning a house. My ultimate goal was to obtain a pre approval for a house by my 1 year anniversary. I am proud to say that today I received a pre approval. Out scores are now right around 700 and very few baddies left. I have 1 baddie left that will fall off at the end of this year. My wife has 1 CO credit card but it is a zero balance and falls off next year. She also has some lates on her student loans from 2009 that are going to be stuck there.

 

I probably won't be working on any more repair while we are in the house purchase process but I will be working on our utilization in the mean time.

 

A word for anyone that is just starting out on their journey. When I came to this site I truly had no hopes and I found this site while researching how to file bankruptcy. I have probably spent more than 150 hours on this site over the last year. At some points I was really down and thought there was nothing I could do. In the end, all of the time and energy that I spent on here was life changing. If you are willing to put in the effort it will be worth it in the end. There are some people who get a quick repair done and there are some that take 2 years. Keep at it and be realistic with yourself on how long it is going to take. I will be here forever to pay it forward and I hope you do the same once your repair is complete.

[aktanaka]

I have been reading your journey for the last few hours and taking as many notes as I possibly could. I started doing this a while back, but it was more off than on. Recently I decided that I am SICK AND TIRED of being SICK AND TIRED and up to my eyeballs in bad credit, payday loans, high interest loans (they were the only ones that would approve me in a pinch). I have already followed and/or completed a few of your 11 steps that you have listed, and I think its high time that I get serious about this. I had already paid off all of my debt about 13 years ago, was completely debt free with the exception of a mortgage. In 2005 I sold my house with a substantial profit, made more than a few bad choices and now I am starting from the beginning. Its like time repeating itself all over again. The last credit pull I did was last week and all 3 CRAs had me in the lowwwwww 500's.... So here's to following my dream of having a better credit score than my mom (shes in the high 700's)...Let the games begin...

 

Already sent EQ an online dispute for addresses, credit pulls. Already sent TU an online dispute for addresses, phone #s, and 4 baddies that are due to delete within the next 60 days. I have a few more that are due to fall off this year anywhere from June - October I believe, and am thinking of sending those ones Obsolete letters just to see what happens. The rest of my melting pot falls off next year, but quite a few are due 2014... Hoping things get better! and GOOD LUCK to ya!!

[ultra2207]

I started right around the same time as you as well. I'm actually in the preapproval process as well, supposed to hear something today. Middle score was 710 with two baddies left. Like you, my goal was FHA but now I'm going conventional. Congrats, it feels good. I've gotten three judgments and multiple collections and other BS removed.

 

 

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[shaloren00]

Thanks so much for sharing your journey. It is very helpful for people like me who are overwhelmed by this site but, really want to improve their credit! I really appreciate how you outlined your steps/progress and put them in bold! My goal is to purchase a home as well. Congrats on your successes!

[futurehomeowner?]

thanks everyone for your well wishes.

 

Tonight was a surreal moment. I was sitting here with a slight problem as outlined in another thread. I really want to be pre approved for a certain home loan. One of the problems with approval was a card with a 90% util. I was trying to figure out how to get this fixed but it is at 0% for a year or so and I don't want to dig into our house funds.

 

While my wife and I were talking about it tonight it hit me. Why not open a card in her name and just transfer it again. I can't believe I am in the position to just say yeah lets do that. I started to go through all the cards with a balance transfer option. I was looking at some cards and decided on the Chase Freedom. It has a 5% rewards, no fee, 0% BT, and a quarterly bonus. NO WAY we can get a card like this. Just a year ago we were approved for a Merrick rebuilding card with a low limit. So I put in all of the required info and hit submit. That little ball spun and spun and spun, then I saw the message. I saw 7-10 days right away and was a little sad. Then I realized it said, your new application package will arrive in 7-10 days. Right above that it said, congratulations you have been approved for $6000. This is just an amazing feeling and I hope all of you that have started your rebuild get to experience this as well. This is our highest limit ever (except for our $7500 kays card but that doesn't count).

[chugs102]

Congrats on the new Chase card. It's a decent one and i use it regularly. And you got a great starting limit too.

[Guest]

GREAT work, futurehomeowner?! You motivate me to continue the journey to better credit!!! And progress!!!

 

Let us STAY THE COURSE!!!

 

And :clapping: