All About Money

I can remember a couple of years back when I had a poor credit score, and more issues on my report than I care to remember. I had no clue on how to build credit. Here I was with a credit history in the low 500’s and nobody would approve me for anything, without ripping my head off with high interest rates. Thankfully though I had a background working with credit, and that forced me to start to take a deeper look into how to build credit. I need to share with you my story and how my credit has bounced back.

First it’s likely good for you to know where I started at. In 2003 I opened a firm and ended up not doing to well with it for some time. It was my first foray into being self employed and this led to some real havoc on me financially. I could not afford to put gas in my car at times, much less the money to pay for my obligations in a timely manner. I ended up getting things together, but by that point the damage was done. I had several credit cards that ended up being charged off and the bill collectors were coming after me.

In December of 2007 I had a car that started breaking down on me. I was twenty-eight years old and I needed to ask my dad to cosign on a loan with me so I would not have to pay a rate of interest at around 18%. By having him cosign for me I was able to get a loan rate at 4% and I still have that car to this day. I have saved thousands of dollars in fees because of this. This, BTW, was the 1st credit I had since the problems I had in 2003.

With having this automobile loan now reporting on time payments, ultimately I was ready to get accepted for a Mastercard in May 2008, but the limit on the card was only $400. While that was great and all, with my past credit score it still took a long while for any other company to approve me for anything. An alternative choice for me at this time also would have been to get a secured credit card to pair with the other credit I was establishing.

Come to find out, the limits on credit card accounts have a ton to do with our abilities to get more credit. The higher your credit limits, the better it is for your credit. Think about it, if you are signing up for another Visa card and had some problems during the past financially, then it’s tough for any company to get a good read on whether you’d be a good credit risk. This holds especially true if you are available revolving credit is only $400.

This is when I began learning about credit repair. I had a choice to make. I could either wait for 7 years minimum for this information to fall off my credit report, or I could kickstart things and find out how to do the credit repair. I selected to kickstart things, and I am so happy i did. To make a long story short, I’ve been able to get pretty much everything removed except 2 things, one being an open charge off account that has had some stupid costs added to it. I could even bring a suit against this company because they are clearly violating my rights because they have not managed to come up with a full accounting of how they come up with their figures. This account is scheduled to fall off in a few months so I haven’t bothered.

Obviously I have had a pretty significant improvement in my scores with all three of the bureaus. I have now qualified for two more unsecured mastercards and may continue to see major enhancements in my scores over the next year. Now knowing precisely how credit works, I also got a $5,000 credit line that reports to the bureaus. Now this is not a normal account, and I can not utilize it for much of anything apart from to buy ebooks online from their site, but it is’s an awesome account to have that has helped my credit score quite a lot, and opened up the door to afford me the chance to get the unsecured credit cards.

Had I not known how to build credit, or learned credit repair then I’d be far away from where i am at the moment. This has got me thinking, because I am really no different than anybody else that has had problems financially during the past. The only difference is that I learned how to build credit and I want to be able to share my experience and information with anybody that is ready to learn. These strategies work 100 percent of the time if implemented correctly, but this is all done with the long term under consideration. If you have a long term vision you can also have these kinds of results.

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