Falling Down

I'm human. Due to health issues in 2011, I couldn't keep on top of everything and trashed my cleaned up credit. Thankfully, it was only a partial slip, but I feel stupid that I'm back to where I was in 2007 after having cleaned everything up. Fortunately, I'm not back to where I was in 2004, so I suppose I should be thankful for that.

Here's my current status:

What I've been Doing

Since August, 2004, I've made a concerted effort to clean up my rather-trashed credit, which had been at least moderately good up until my husband died. While he died more than seven years ago, some of the financial effects did not occur until several years later, when the house of cards finally came tumbling down.

How've I Done So Far

The + numbers beneath each score show how many points I've increased my FICO score for that credit reporting agency. The "Classic Risk" FICO score ranges from 300-850 points, so there's a 550-point range overall. In other words, 100 points is a lot.

When I first pulled my credit reports in 2004, I remember exactly where I was sitting: in a hotel in Boston. I was, to put it mildly, horrified. I knew my credit would be bad, but there were so many names I didn't recognize on my report. I was desolate. I'd recently been turned down for a credit card from a deep subprime lender. Searching on that lender's name on Google, I came across Art of Credit (sadly no longer), Credit Info Center and, later Credit Boards. I've also been active on Infinite Credit. Of all of these boards, Credit Boards is the largest and most diverse.

I learned a lot about what I needed to do to tackle the problem, and wrote myself a short list for each month. I didn't want to tackle everything all at once.

There's been various threads on both boards about how one keeps organized. I use charts. For example, this is one of my motivating charts:

As you can see, I had 35 negative items on my combined credit reports when I started, consisting of:

1. Seven charged-off accounts (now one).
2. Twelve collection accounts (now zero).
3. Sixteen accounts with late payments (now seven). Worse, I'd been late the previous month on one account (I'd missed paying it entirely), so I had recent late payments on my credit reports.

Not every credit reporting agency has the same negative items. Here's the view over time:

Let's contrast that with the current revolving credit I had at the time:

1. One Visa/MC with a limit of $250 that I'd had for four years.
2. Two Visa/MC with a limit of $350 that I'd had for five years.
3. One Visa/MC with a limit of $475 that I'd had for six years.

I've now closed all of my rebuilder accounts.

Currently I have:

1. Several Visa/MC with limits between $500 and $15,000.
2. Several store cards with limits between $250 and $2000.
3. For the first time in my life, an American Express card. Two, actually, one with a limit higher than any of my other cards.

Lots more quantity, some improvement in quality, but I'm Not There Yet.

As time progressed, I had fewer "baddies" - some of the accounts really weren't mine. In fact, I found out about a case of identity theft as a result of this process, where someone had opened up a cell phone account in my name, then stopped paying for it. It had been hurting me for years, but I'd never known. I've gone from seventeen total positive accounts to forty-two, almost all of which were new tradelines.

In a couple of cases, the negatives were so old that they stopped hurting me. Some of my late payments "fell off" my report, making a negative tradeline into a positive one. In short, it took over 100 certified mail letters (all return receipt requested, of course) to get the kind of change I did. I had to keep track of everything. It was a lot of work.

How Long Does it Take?

There's no one answer, and I'm not just saying that. Here's a graph of my FICO progress over time:

Much of the initial gain is due to the aging of the extremely recent lates, I suspect. In other words, I first checked when I was in a trough.

But, getting back to time, here's some upcoming milestones for me:

1. In eleven months, my most recent tradeline will be a year old. Right now, I've got a ton of inquiries, so some of them will have fallen off and the rest will not be affecting my FICO score. On the other hand, I now have significantly better plastic as a result of my efforts.
2. In less than a year, most of my remaining baddies will go bye-bye for good because they're just that old. Most of these are old late payments, so the tradelines will still exist, and it will look like a positive, long-established, tradeline.
3. In three years, the worst negative item will be off my report.
4. In 58 months, even the lates I got just before starting my credit repair will all be off my report.

I really only worked at this hard for about 8 months, then took about 8 months off when I did nothing credit-wise, and come back to it every now and again.

Where Am I Going From Here?

What's currently hurting my credit the most (other than things time will heal) is high utilization. I estimate that I may be able to get another 100 points if I pay off the remaining chargeoff (around $500) and get my total utilization down to under 25%. (For those of you who don't know the term, utilization is the relative percentage of how much you're using on your credit cards compared to the credit limits. Currently, I'm using nearly 70%, which is awful. But, like I said, I have this new job....