Credit Tips: How to Recover From Bad Credit with Credit Cards

Posted On: July 20, 2006

Author: shopgirl
Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 4:57 pm
Post subject: new to bad credit. need advice

Hi everyone. I went from having a credit score of 730 to having a credit score of 499. Ouch. What happened is that I bought a house that was WAY too expensive and got a couple of new high limit cards that I went shopping with. Anyways, my sig other lost his job, we got behind, and took us 10 months to sell the house. In those 10 months, we paid only mortgage to avoid foreclosure. All my credit cards ended up being charged off (about 7). Car payment has always been on time. I lost my entire down payment on that house and now I live paycheck to paycheck in an apartment. Hard lesson to learn. I can’t find a lot of info on charge offs. How can my credit repair itself if these stay on for 7 years? Will my credit score be 499 for the next 7 years? I don’t plan on getting any more credit cards, but would like to someday own a house again. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you. Oh, and another question. I tried to get a car loan the other day on a cheap second car, and they said only one place would give me a loan for 25%. I of course declined, but I saw 8 hard hits on my credit report after this. Do these count as 8 separate inquiries if it was to search for one loan??? Thanks again.

Author: Brammy
Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 7:18 pm
Post subject:

Auto loan shopping generally show up as one inquiry as long as the hits are within a couple of weeks. Yes you CAN rebuild your credit. Take it from someone who went down to the very dregs resulting in chapt 7 BK.

You have a couple of alternatives, one, you can repay the outstanding debts. Do you have any accounts still open? If so hold on to those for dear life. If you have a long history with any creditor, make arrangements to pay off the debt if possible and ask them to reopen the account. It DOES happen. If all else fails, and you have no other choice, try some of the BK friendly crds in the sticky at the top or a secured card.

Be pristine with these guys. Your score will improve as your charge offs age. Having a current account with good payment history wouldn’t hurt either, even if it is a secured card.

Or you can do what I did. I took a couple of local finance company loans all paid within 6 mos. I used it almost as a revolving line of credit. As soon as it was paid off, I opened another with the same company. I finally got the reporting history I needed to transition up to a revolving line, ie credit card.

Author: rain
Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 7:41 am
Post subject: How to Recover From Bad Credit with Credit Cards

It will be okay in time, and you’ll be able to get mortgages, etc, although the rates will be ~4% higher than normal rates.

I’m no expert, have been surfing some great forums. Do you know creditboards.com ? They have excellent discussions. Lots of people get dumped on by life. You are never alone. :–)