OurFreshStart

My credit union, BCU, gave me 2.24% on a 662 credit score.

My credit dropped 10 points because the account shows closed.  US Department of Education is not taking phone calls at this time.  Very frustrating.

Increased credit scores require demonstrated use of credit.  Your only debt reporting was your mortgage.  Now that it is paid off, you have no credit behavior from which the credit reporting agencies can draw from.  The 40 point drop is because you have suddenly become an unknown. If you want your score to increase, open credit accounts and use them sparingly while keeping your utilization down.

Bizarrely, my CK score is 668 but a recent TU FICO pull for a credit card has me at 713.  Use this site to help you improve your scores, but don't trust the credit score.

I called after 6 months and they gave me a $150 increase.  Not great, but it is an increase.

I had a 40 point increase in my credit score in 6 months from 633 to 673 and the only change was this card.

If you have a 56 point discrepancy between two of the credit reporting agencies, you have a bigger problem.  Pull your credit reports at "Annualcreditreport.com" and see why.  Dispute everything that is inaccurate and wait for the process to complete.  Once your reports are in sync, you should see no more than a 15 point spread between your credit scores. Chances are the inquiry they did in the morning is showing up as a hard inquiry on your report(s).  If that is true, the second time is showing you applying for two credit cards in the same day.  This suggests to credit card companies that you are trying to load up on credit which is a behavior seen in people who are on the verge of default.  Call and talk to a representatvie and explain the situation as recommended by the other poster. Your Credit Karma score is pulled from Trans Union and should be pretty close to what Trans Union will report.

 My only beef with this card is that I have better credit than my wife in all respects yet they gave me a $300 credit limit and her a $500 credit limit on our respective cards.  We have the same income (all mine), the same debt (all shared) and my credit is 40 points higher across the board (Equifax, Experian and Trans Union.)  She even claimed several more credit cards with higher balances in our bankruptcy increasing the liklihood of default in the eyes of credit granters. I've heard that credit card companies bias toward women but isn't that illegal discrimination?  Why give someone with lower credit scores a higher limit?   Otherwise, they report to all three credit reporting agencies monthly.  Make sure you are paid to below 20% of the limit by the statement date to get the greatest increase in your credit scores.  For me, the statement date is 4-5 days after the due date for the bill: it is not the same date so be careful!

It depends if the mortgage was reaffirmed during your bankruptcy.  The easiest way to find out is to look on your mortgage statement: if it says somewhere on there that the information is for informational purposes only, they did not reaffirm.  If you don't see such a statement (or something like it), check your credit report to see if they are still reporting your payments.  If the mortgage was reaffirmed, it will further hurt your score.  If it wasn't the forclosure won't hurt at all. If the mortgage statement has the disclosure and they are still reporting you have an option.  On-time payments will improve your score but getting behind will hurt.  If you cannot make the payments or have gotten behind and they did not reaffirm, it may be in your best interest to contact them by mail and firmly state that, due to bankrupcy, they must no longer report the mortgage information to the credit reporting agencies.  Send the letter via certified mail to their bankruptcy/legal division.  When they stop, write letters to the three bureaus contesting that they they are reporting relating to your mortgage though it was claimed during bankruptcy.  After verifying with the mortgage company, they will change your mortgae reporting to "discharged under bankruptcy" and wipe out all information following the discharge date.

I did not want to declare bankruptcy either but circumstances pushed me into it.  I wish I had two years before.  Why?  because bankruptcy is not necessarily a bad thing.  It is a fresh start.  Though the bankruptcy stays on your record, you can still rebuild credit.  I received an auto loan six months after my bankruptcy, for a Lexus no less, and improved my credit from 530 to 688 in less than three years.  If I was wise and did the secured card route I would be well over 700 at this point as my credit generally goes up 40 points with every card added and 4 points per month for every month I use the cards wisely.  Pay the student loans on time every month as soon as you can get out of forebearance and that will work wonders too because they will be some of your oldest accounts. I should note that before my bankruptcy, by credit score was 560.  After my bankruptcy it was 530.  It did not improve until I purchased the car.   Whatever you do, do not go into debt consolidation.  It often prolongs the bad debt and does not help in the long run.  You are better off in bankruptcy.

Find out the cutoff/closing date of your statement from your credit card companies.  Just ask a customer service representative and they should be able to tell you.  Pay your credit cards down the day before that cutoff date at the latest. This will give you the best of both worlds:  your credit card company will see usage that is limited by their limits and will want to increase your limits to try to get you to use the card more and your utilization will stay down which will increase your credit.  The best strategy for increasing your limit is to use 50% or a little more of your credit limits each month, if you can and pay it off to less than 10% of your limit.  Increased limits will help your score as well.

We have been living a cash lifestyle for the last three years and are quite content.  The only reason that I am here is because, after we disapeared our credit cards and everything else except my student loan, our credit took a nosedive.  We are now in a place where we would like to purchase a larger house because we need another bathroom and more space as our daughter gets older, but our credit needs improvement to pick up a mortgage with a favorable rate.  At the moment, we gained one credit card and are on the road to improving our credit. That said, we use the credit card and those we will get subsequently to pay for things that we ordinarily pay for anyway and pay them off each month just as if we were paying cash.  Yes, content cash lifestyle people are lurking here.

That won't help you if you are looking to purchase a house or car.  I am stuck because I lived a cash lifestyle for the last two years and my credit suffered for it.  I could easily buy a very nice house now if I had worked on the credit.  Unfortunately, I have a couple years to wait for the score to go back up and I have to work the credit system hard to get there.

Sorry, tried it.  They are serviced nationally by GE Moneybank, another tight-fisted group when it comes to lending.  Thank you anyway!

Sears is no longer issued or serviced by Sears, it is issued and serviced by Citibank. It is my understanding that they treat your application the same as they would if you applied for a Citibank Visa which is not one of the easier cards to get. The the Voodoo comes in...

Go to AnnualCreditReport.com and pull your reports for free. This will open temporary free access accounts with the three major credit bureaus. Use that account access to submit disputes for any and all incorrect information. The bureaus will then do an investigation to verify the information is incorrect. If it is incorrect, they will remove the incorrect information from the file.

Using this method I was able to remove quite a bit of incorrect and inaccurate information from my credit report. Good Luck!

First of all, jarena82, Obama and the recent credit legislation have nothing to do with this. Quit with the political BS. This is a credit forum, not a political platform.

That said, Ccaligator, contact your bankruptcy attorney and request a letter and an "In re. Mendiola" statement letter to send to thes collection people. This should have been give to you by the attorney and is boilerplate at this point so they should be glad to give it to you. The "In Re. Mendiola" case effectively is legal case precedent stating that you are not required to re-open your bankruptcy for debts that were inadvertently not claimed or that you were unaware of during your bankruptcy proceeding. This includes any debt that was being passed to debt collectors before, during or after your bankruptcy was discharged (except tax leins and student loans which are exempt from bankruptcy) by lenders you wer indebted to prior to your bankruptcy. If they receive the letters and do not cease their collection efforts and remove any adverse reporting from your credit report placed there after your bankruptcy they can lose their license to operate with a simple report to the U.S. Attorney General so they usually comply immediately.

Send the letters certified mail and regular mail at the same time: if they accept the certified mail you should see results. If they don't accept, send the returned letter to the Attorney General.

There are likely dealers in your area who specialize in getting the loan for you. It helps to have steady income and a good down payment. We put $5k down on a $15k used Lexus (which turned out to be a great deal in itself as we had the car appraised later at $21k) and got a really nice 6.5% interest rate to boot. This was less than one year after our bankruptcy was discharged in September of '08.

If you search online for "Bankruptcy Car Loan" and provide your information like we did you will probably get responses from the same two or three dealers. These people truly specialize in getting you into a car. It is not likely that you will get a new car, but a few year old off-lease one instead. These cars often come with the remainder of the factory warranty and are pretty well taken care of.

FYI: our loan is through Wauchovia Dealer Services. They have since been purchased by Wells Fargo which we found is now lending to almost nobody, even those with good credit. I have no doubt, however, that the dealer we bought from can still get financing for bankruptcy filers.

Good luck!