With recent gains on my own credit recovery I turned my efforts towards my wife's credit. I was surprised to see the item ($81. collections) I had most recently been successful in removing from my credit, now on hers! Looking more closely, the debt had increased to $88, Date Opened changed from 2004 (on mine) to 2010 on hers. On mine the CA posted two monthly "KD" events which they call significantly derogatory; after transferring over to hers they increased that to 24 KD events over the last 24 months. So in effect they took a smaller black mark off my credit history and dropped a worse black mark on hers. I've started the online dispute process to see if the CA wants to give it up right now for same account, almost same dollar amount and same debtor last name, so recently after they removed mine. I cross my fingers and wait. One last thing to add that I'm still understanding or trying to. The smaller black mark on my credit history damaged my credit score far far more than the larger black mark on hers. Why? I wonder if its because the sheer volume of accounts/history for her is much longer; the reason for that is not based in fact but only because I had so many bad items removed from my credit history over the past few years that my credit history is thin - despite it still going back more than 2 decades. Thoughts on that? Or is this as obvious as "frogs are green" ?
Credit scores are complex creatures... It's a combination of so many different factors that it's challenging to pinpoint the one(s) at play. The irony is that there are even times when a negative account is a positive factor on your credit report because of the age and history of the account. (Imagine spending months fighting *THAT* battle, and end up with a loss instead of a gain!)
Funny that you mention a negative becoming a positive. One change I made right away was to transfer the balance from her amex (90-100% utilized.... yes, I know, I told her...) to one of my new ones that has a 30 grand limit, where the same balance that was a negative on hers became either a non-event or a positive on mine. Making this change made both of our credit to debt ratios more "normal" I think, which is good for mine after all the many deletions of bad things that have happened - it makes my track record better, yes, but thinner. So I'm trying to fatten it up a bit. Back to the relative damage that one collections account can do, I figure its kinda relative. One black mark on a record three times as voluminous as mine matters less. I'm guessing of course; its likely to really a few orders of magnitude more complicated than that...
