Mistakes you made rebuilding

[bigpoppa09]

Obviously the Amex is better. But you can't get Amex with a PR showing. My options are limited to the BK friendly creditors until 2023, unless I take a stab at getting it removed, which may be worth the attempt when my IIBs age off, but wasn't an option to me in the immediate aftermath of the discharge.

 

I ended up with all the store cards I have because I was looking for "free" (as in, no AF) TLs, for a few reasons:

 

1. I wanted five TLs ASAP after my BK, thought that was the magic number, and I couldn't find four bankcards (secured or otherwise) that were cool with the BK. Only found two: CapOne secured and CreditOne.

 

2. I figured "more is better" from an AAOA standpoint. Hard to have good AAOA in the early stages of a rebuild but years from now all the open TLs will minimize the AAOA hit from future additions.

 

3. Some of them are genuinely useful to me and compete favorably with the rewards I get on my current cards. That won't be the case forever but it's the case right now. The others that aren't particularly useful (Home Depot) don't have a huge opportunity cost; I hit them bimonthly or quarterly with small (<$20) purchases to keep them active.

 

One of them happens to be my oldest open TL with a local gas chain in a part of the US I no longer live in. Survived my BK because they don't pull A/Rs, I paid it beforehand, and had never owed enough on it to make it a preferential payment. Certainly don't want to close it now, due to the age, so I left it behind with a trusted friend who uses it once a quarter to keep it active and mails me a check to cover the bill.

What do u mean u can't get Amex with a PR showing if u are referring to a BK they will approve u for a card 5 years after a BK has been discharged.

[FoxSamual]

Doesn't help me right now, just shy of four years from discharge....

 

Options are limited for TLs.

[bigpoppa09]

Doesn't help me right now, just shy of four years from discharge....

 

Options are limited for TLs.

Ok i let u know that for future reference.

[FoxSamual]

Is that a new policy? I tried to get them after my first BK and got shot down every time. Last attempt was at year seven, with 770 FICO, <10% utilization, no derogs except the PR, no inquiries, and still rejected with the PR as the excuse. They were not IIB; I never had an account with them, then or now.

[bigpoppa09]

Is that a new policy? I tried to get them after my first BK and got shot down every time. Last attempt was at year seven, with 770 FICO, <10% utilization, no derogs except the PR, no inquiries, and still rejected with the PR as the excuse. They were not IIB; I never had an account with them, then or now.

Plenty of people have reported getting a Amex if they didn't burn them 5 years from discharge date. DW has a BK when she is at 5 years pulling the trigger lol.

[whipped]

- Going in debt again

- Too many toy cards

- Not viewing CC as a way to save money and get bonus vs racking up debt

[dvd]

Being reactive not proactive.

Not having a strategy and a action plan.

Not doing my research before taking any action.

Too much reliance on repairing and not concurrently rebuilding, nor curbing my bad financial habits.

[hegemony]

 

1) not filing BK sooner; I kept thinking I could handle it and did not want the social "stigma" of a BK

 

So Hege....

 

How much sooner do you estimate that you should have filed BK? Especially since hindsight is always 20/20.....

 

2 years.

[ftpwatcher]

 

Is that a new policy? I tried to get them after my first BK and got shot down every time. Last attempt was at year seven, with 770 FICO, <10% utilization, no derogs except the PR, no inquiries, and still rejected with the PR as the excuse. They were not IIB; I never had an account with them, then or now.

Plenty of people have reported getting a Amex if they didn't burn them 5 years from discharge date. DW has a BK when she is at 5 years pulling the trigger lol.

 

I have my bk7 discharged in mid 2011

In this year I got 3 cards from Amex

OBC 10k, SPG 11k, and business plus 19.5k with bk still reporting.

They were not burned in bk.

[brainchasm]

I don't know if they were mistakes, but in the beginning of rebuilding I got some jewelry card or another (I think it was Kay's?), and a BBRZ MC with a silly $100 limit.

 

The jewelry card isn't even on my report anymore (I think they were able to just...delete their TL back then?)

 

The BBRZ is still lingering, closed for gotta be close to a decade now.

 

They served their purpose, sorta. I've obviously outgrown them to the point of ridiculousness, but it was what it was.

 

At this point, I have zero toy cards/limits, and very few co-branded anythings.

Edited August 24, 2017 by brainchasm

[ddom90]

Question with a closed account that had one 30 day, one 60 day late butbhas been paid on time and now had zero balance with Amex should I attempt to re-open or ask for goodwill or deletion? What's better credit wise generally speaking.

 

<p>

 

If you have successfully rebuilt your credit, list the mistakes you made rebuilding so that hopefully others on CB can avoid those same mistakes.

 

My main mistakes:

• not starting with a secured card. I started with Orchard Bank, which was a sub subprime issuer that "fortunately" was eventually bought out by Cap1.
• doing business with Credit One because I didn't want to get a secured card.
• when I did finally open secured CCs with DCU and SDFCU, I should have made the security deposits much higher than the minimum. At the time, I begrudgingly opened them and was not fully convinced that secured cards were a shortcut to rebuilding and getting higher limits.
• not asking my brother sooner to get me in to NFCU.

[mendelssohn]

Question with a closed account that had one 30 day, one 60 day late butbhas been paid on time and now had zero balance with Amex should I attempt to re-open or ask for goodwill or deletion? What's better credit wise generally speaking.

 

<p>

 

If you have successfully rebuilt your credit, list the mistakes you made rebuilding so that hopefully others on CB can avoid those same mistakes.

 

My main mistakes:

• not starting with a secured card. I started with Orchard Bank, which was a sub subprime issuer that "fortunately" was eventually bought out by Cap1.
• doing business with Credit One because I didn't want to get a secured card.
• when I did finally open secured CCs with DCU and SDFCU, I should have made the security deposits much higher than the minimum. At the time, I begrudgingly opened them and was not fully convinced that secured cards were a shortcut to rebuilding and getting higher limits.
• not asking my brother sooner to get me in to NFCU.

 

 

How long ago was it closed?

 

Ideally you want the lates gone. They late payments will eventually age off your reports though and the account will become positive.

[mendelssohn]

Obviously the Amex is better. But you can't get Amex with a PR showing. My options are limited to the BK friendly creditors until 2023, unless I take a stab at getting it removed, which may be worth the attempt when my IIBs age off, but wasn't an option to me in the immediate aftermath of the discharge.

 

I ended up with all the store cards I have because I was looking for "free" (as in, no AF) TLs, for a few reasons:

 

1. I wanted five TLs ASAP after my BK, thought that was the magic number, and I couldn't find four bankcards (secured or otherwise) that were cool with the BK. Only found two: CapOne secured and CreditOne.

 

2. I figured "more is better" from an AAOA standpoint. Hard to have good AAOA in the early stages of a rebuild but years from now all the open TLs will minimize the AAOA hit from future additions.

 

3. Some of them are genuinely useful to me and compete favorably with the rewards I get on my current cards. That won't be the case forever but it's the case right now. The others that aren't particularly useful (Home Depot) don't have a huge opportunity cost; I hit them bimonthly or quarterly with small (<$20) purchases to keep them active.

 

One of them happens to be my oldest open TL with a local gas chain in a part of the US I no longer live in. Survived my BK because they don't pull A/Rs, I paid it beforehand, and had never owed enough on it to make it a preferential payment. Certainly don't want to close it now, due to the age, so I left it behind with a trusted friend who uses it once a quarter to keep it active and mails me a check to cover the bill.

 

There are a lot more BK friendly issuers out there. Credit One was not necessary, and there are certainly plenty of secured cards. I remember when I first came to CB and a lot of people had all of their cards listed in their signature, some of the BK people had very impressive profiles.

[Rakurai]

I let most of my cards default back in 2009-10, and just abstained from credit for 6.5 years. My biggest mistakes before starting rebuild in December 2016 were:

 

Letting every card default or close from inactivity. I really wish I had an old open card.

Waiting for almost clean reports to start getting new accounts. A secured card 2 years ago would help a lot.

Not joining NFCU a long time ago.

[FoxSamual]

There are a lot more BK friendly issuers out there. Credit One was not necessary, and there are certainly plenty of secured cards. I remember when I first came to CB and a lot of people had all of their cards listed in their signature, some of the BK people had very impressive profiles.

 

I went through all of the ones that I knew of. Many denied me because I had burned them in BK. All of the ones on the usual list here were not available to me, with the exception of Cap One (got them) and Discover secured. If you're looking for a mistake it would be not applying for Discover; I was genuinely unaware they had a secured card. My last experience with them was being rejected for a card years after my first BK, with a 720 FICO and no derog TLs, with the PR given as the reason why. I wrongly assumed they were only interested in the "prime" business and BK was a deal breaker for them.

 

Credit One was not sought, incidentally, they mailed me a solicitation, I read the terms, and opened the card knowing full well what they were. I viewed it as paying $99/yr for a positive TL in a time when I had scant options for TLs. A quarter a day, big deal, I spend more than that on coffee.

 

Everybody here treats them like the plague, which I generally concur with, assuming one has other options, but in the hierarchy of mistakes they're pretty low on the list. I actually wish I had kept it open, at least long enough to see how long they'd keep waiving the membership fee, but everyone here vomited all over them, so I closed my third oldest TL. Probably doesn't matter, in the end, but I really wish people here would step back from the 20/20 hindsight when they meet a member who has already opened an account with them. Y'all made me feel really small with page after page of beating up on them when I first posted my profile. *insert dead horse emoji here*

[mendelssohn]

No we don't. We encourage them to close the mistake and move forward.

[mikenola]

The single biggest mistake I made was in Jan 2000. I was told I was going to die in six months. At the time there were few to no death benefit insurance policies that i could take out and I made the decision to organize my estate before dying.

 

I had scores in the high 700's and over 100K in credit lines all in good standing, no lates, no problems except the occasional high balance due to work expense reports not being processed quickly enough.

 

 

Shut down all cards, paid off mortgages, put everything in trust for my kid. I stupidly shut down my Amex Platinum because I did not want to pay the upcomming annual fee.

 

I learned to live on a debit card the minimal income from my VA Pension.

 

in and out of remission for years, and finally in 2016 I said to hell with the doctors I am apparently going to live. Started to rebuild then.

 

I found my second big mistake was in all those years I never checked my credit, and in 2015 a Cap 1 card was opened against my credit. It apparently defaulted and a collection went on my records as of 2015. I am fighting to get it removed. Police keep telling me it is too old to write up a stolen identity report and this is the only credit line that was opened by whoever did it.

 

Other than that since Oct 2016 I have gained 50K in TL's. AoA and AAOA suck and will continue to for a while. As will the amount of new credit lines. I owe 2K on the cards and I have a NFCU cloc owing 9k right now. I also went back to school to get new credentials and am workign on my Doctorate so I have school loans which EQ really does not like.

 

For me and my situation, having the low AoA and AAOA is not that big an issue. I knew they would be affected but I expect to need the 50K available credit in the near future to cover different expenses relating to my Doctorate and then building a business around that degree. I will complete it in Oct 2019 (if my dissertation is accepted) at which point my AoA will be about 7 years and if I don't add any other cards my AAOA will be around 4 years. As I understand it, FICO likes accounts to be at least 25 months old before they stop really penalizing them as being "new" so if that is right I should be in good standing come 2019.

 

at this point I am in the mid-high 600's. Paying off the CLOC and student loans as fast as I can.

 

 

Oddly a cli from NFUC bumping my CC there by 3k late last month, just hit and it dropped my EQ 3 points on EQ and 4 points on MF today. my new discover card has not hit yet and TU did not dr50K op my score because of the hard pull.

 

I am BTing the 2K to Discover for the 18 months 0% interest. The money is on my CSP and that will let that card rest for a while

 

Next move into the garden for at least 6 months to a year except for any soft pull CLI's possible.

Edited August 24, 2017 by mikenola

[ddom90]

 

Question with a closed account that had one 30 day, one 60 day late butbhas been paid on time and now had zero balance with Amex should I attempt to re-open or ask for goodwill or deletion? What's better credit wise generally speaking.

 

<p>

 

If you have successfully rebuilt your credit, list the mistakes you made rebuilding so that hopefully others on CB can avoid those same mistakes.

 

My main mistakes:

• not starting with a secured card. I started with Orchard Bank, which was a sub subprime issuer that "fortunately" was eventually bought out by Cap1.
• doing business with Credit One because I didn't want to get a secured card.
• when I did finally open secured CCs with DCU and SDFCU, I should have made the security deposits much higher than the minimum. At the time, I begrudgingly opened them and was not fully convinced that secured cards were a shortcut to rebuilding and getting higher limits.
• not asking my brother sooner to get me in to NFCU.

How long ago was it closed?

 

Ideally you want the lates gone. They late payments will eventually age off your reports though and the account will become positive.

The account was closed in February, the missed payments were due to me being in the hospital. It was closed to non use for the same reason.

[Poor Bastard]

Great thread. I don't consider it a mistake insofar as there was no logical reason to think I was doing anything wrong by accepting an offer from Chase for a 3rd Chase card, but with the benefit of hindsight I would not have done so. It triggered an internal alert which resulted in an account review and them ridiculously closing all my accounts. So based on my experience, if you're rebuilding, don't apply for more than 2 Chase cards in a period of 24 months. Of course my experience may not apply to everyone and YMMV.

[FoxSamual]

I read your thread; Chase really screwed you there. Can't fathom why they didn't just do CLDs. Closing the cards and leaving you to get declinations at POS was a really lousy move.

[Redlegs]

I'm building my credit from scratch and really the only mistake I can think of is getting a SCT card. Though I actually get use of it so it's not a really bad one. I joined NFCU right before they shut down that method of entry. Now though I don't really need a card of theirs so I just have one more bank account to deal with for now unless something changes.

 

 

 

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