I started my credit repair journey back in May when my wife and I were looking at getting a mortgage. My credit scores were in the low to mid 500's and since then I would pull my reports almost daily and dispute items every couple of weeks. I've managed to get my scores up to the mid 600's and got a lot of the negative info off my report. I applied for a mortgage and we're set to close on September 22nd Right now, though, I'm scared to try to dispute anything on my report because there were a few items still listed as being in dispute when I applied for the mortgage and the broker made me write out an explaination for each of the disputes. I want to make sure this mortgage will go through, so I've decided to let my reports sit as is until we close the loan. Of course, this means that I've gone cold turkey from checking my reports and sending disputes and there are a few accounts on the report that I really really want to try to fix. ::sigh:: I can't wait until we move and maybe having a new address will help me get a couple of the more stubborn things off. Oh well... just needed to vent. Brett
You need not abstain from credit repair while the mortgage is pending - you accessing your own credit file is a "soft" inquiry and is invisible to lenders. I would caution you that, by having old accounts deleted, you are lowering your "average age" of accounts, which costs FICO points. When I started my credit repair I got 30 negatives deleted in my first pass through, and it lowered my FICO by over 40 points!!!! The reason is that my average account ages was reduced considerably. Consider this - my derogatory accounts were on average over 10 years old. My good ccounts were on average less than 3 years old. Take off the derogs and the total average age decresased considerably. While it feels good only having 3 derog trade lines instead of 35, my FICO is only now, after 6 months, back where it was before I started credit repair. The last 3 derogs will come off under FCRA within the next 2 years.
Re: Re: Help... I'm going through withdrawl I can pull my own report, but without having any ongoing disputes it's not nearly as exciting anymore Mostly, though I'm afraid to put another account into dispute since the bank might get curious about what's going on and delay the mortgage. Also, at one point, I disputed late payments on one account and when the dispute was 'resolved' I wound up with more late payments than I started with. I'd hate for that to happen again. The two accounts that I really really want to get rid of are only a year and a half old, so I don't think I'm in too much danger there. The other accounts aren't too much older and I'm mostly hoping to just clean up the payment history, so I'm not too concerned about lowering the average age. Because the late payments are so recent (some as short as 6 months ago) I think I'd be better of with the slightly lowered age than the recent negatives. Thanks for the advice Brett
