Walking into the Chrysler dealership, I thought getting a loan was going to be a fairly simple process . However, the sales guy ran my credit report and gave me the bad news: basically, I had terrible credit with a score of 490 . I was unaware, but there were a bunch of charge offs on my credit report. Basically, I had a lot of debts that were actually joint debts from back when I was married . I had thought my ex husband was taking responsibility for those debts since he was the only one who used them . He wasn’t , so now I have a lower credit score because of it. Last time I checked, my score was great .
Obviously I had to do something quick to raise my credit score if I ever wanted to get financed on a car (or anything else for that matter ), but I didn’t know how to fix my score. The first thing I did was to order a personal copy of my credit report from annualcreditreport.com . I reviewed every single debt , taking special note of the older debts left by my husband. I reached out to them first, and offered a settlement, and to my surprise a majority of the creditors were willing to negotiate a lower amount . In fact, I settled for half of the debt or less in most cases. As part of the process, I asked each of the creditors for a letter that said “The debt has been paid in full.” Part of my agreement with all these creditors was that they would make no mention on my credit report that the debt had been settled for less than the full amount owed, since this looks bad to potential lenders in the future .
For the new debts, I used the same strategy, with one exception: I didn’t recognize some of the charges, and I felt they were not valid . I contested these debts using forms from the credit bureaus. The creditor had to either provide proof of debt validity or remove it from my report in a specified period of time . I got three debts removed this way when the creditor did not provide proof of the debt .
So, after a couple of months, my score started creeping back up , and within five months I had gotten my score back up to 670. I am now almost at 710 again, about nine months after that day I learned about my terrible credit situation.
Filed under credit by on Jan 17th, 2011. Comment.
