I didn’t hit my target of being debt-free by Christmas but today I have cancelled four more cards bringing the total to six. It hurt a little, two of them had relatively high limits for my less-than-stellar credit score, but the interest rates were terrible and one had an annual fee too. One shitty card remains until a credit posts — I couldn’t get them to waive the annual fee that they just charged, but they offered a credit of $1 more than the annual fee. WTF?
I’ve taken on one new card with the highest limit I’ve ever had, no fees, and a decent rate to boot. Two more new cards came from applying for credit to get discounts on purchases I was making anyways, with no fees but lousy rates. Paid off one today and will cancel it as soon as the online balance shows $0. The other one I’m going to hang on to for now because it’s with a major bank and I’m hoping they will give me a better deal in the future.
My real goal isn’t so much to have no debt but rather to get my FICO scores up so I can get better credit and be in a good position for buying a house next year — tho with what’s happening to the sub-prime mortgage market I’m starting to become concerned that I’ll have to come up with a ton of cash too, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. I’ve subscribed to TransUnion’s TrueCredit service to monitor my progress, which isn’t cheap ($180/year) but is the only service I found that provides unlimited updates along with the actual FICO scores from TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. Many of the other “unlimited” services only provide reports or scores from one agency, or provide “simulated” scores instead of the actual FICO scores.
The first part of my plan has been to pay off debt and correct any errors relating to it. A few months ago, all of the credit reporting agencies were showing substantially more debt than I actually owed — like more than double. This was primarily due to listing high balances on accounts that had in fact been paid in full and closed. Getting the corrections made was easy enough, and while my total balances are still higher than reality they have been declining and ought to catch up soon.
The second part has been to get rid of my collections. They are all my fault, nobody to blame but myself. I got two to go away when the reporting collection agency failed to verify the debt. Three remain and the amounts are small so sometime next month I will start sending out offers for payment-in-full in exchange for reporting the delinquencies as erroneous. I have no idea if that will work but it can’t hurt to try.
So far the plan has been working, my score with TransUnion has been steadily rising for several months and I just got a nice bump with Experian. Equifax has stubbornly refused to budge but I’m hopeful that it will start trending up soon. American Express just approved me for a card, which is a major milestone for me — I had a Corporate card while I was in Germany which went 180 days past-due because of problems at the home office; I paid it in full as soon as I became aware but they closed my account and have declined credit to me ever since, as recently as October.
