Got an email from Sue Simon at myFICO, who wants to hear my experiences using the service. There is a promise to ask permission before publishing or using the information, but I was wondering if anyone else got this email and what they think of it.
I don't know about myFICO, but I'd surely love to read/learn from your story. My numbers are right at what your starting ones were, and it gives me hope to see how far you've come. Wow.
My story, in a nutshell, is that I kept two (crap) cards w/zero balances as I did my Ch7. They had CLs of $10k (DMB) and $5k (Aspire). Actually, I had another crap card, NextCard, but they went out of business. I was out of work, so I lived for a while on my cards - big mistake, BTW, next time I'll borrow from a loan shark, their rates are more reasonable. I ran up $18k on my 3 crap cards and realized I had to do something. Started reading up, and put all my effort into paying off my cards. Once I found work, kept plugging away until my cards were paid off, took about 18 months altogether. So my guess - and that's all it is, a guess when it comes to FICO - is that once I got to the two year mark w/my Ch7, it did not weigh down my score as heavily. Paying off my balances seemed to raise my score about 100 points. Acquiring a car loan and another crap card - Cap1 - also seemed to help. I still have two bad TLs on each CR, they were included in BK. I have between 3 and 5 tax liens, all marked as paid or released. So I've got nothing close to a "clean" CR at all. But the TLs are "covered" by my BK and my liens are all marked as released/paid, so I was able to get a decent mortgage rate and close on a condo last week. I got over $300k at 5.5% fixed (30 years) with 5% down. I have been turned down recently by Amex, BofA and even Chase, where I have a car loan, all because of my BK. That scarlet letter will stay on until 2011, another seven years. For now, I've hit all my goals and I'm set for a while. I might start disputing the public records again, after my new address becomes "old" and I wipe my former address, but with a big fat mortgage, a car loan on a fairly new car and low balances on my $22k of crap credit cards, I'm all set. The interest rates are pretty high, so why would I want to keep any balances? I've got a 3.99% six month promo rate w/DMB, I'm using that for a while and I'll pay it off in the summer. I'm confident that in a few years, I'll have close to 800 scores and when the BK falls off, I'll have my pick of cards. Given that I got here (creditnet) less than a year ago, I'm delighted with my results. The loan officer who took my app looked at everything and said "I've never seen anyone have such a great credit score after a BK. It's like you did everything at the perfect times" - and yes, there were reasons it all "seemed" to happen at the right times. You get lemons, you make lemonade. I kept three crap cards out of my BK, I used the CLs and built from there. They don't care WHAT bank I'm dealing with, if it's Amex or Orchard, if I've got four revolvling lines of credit and a $22k total CL and less than a $1k balance, that looks good.
Awesome, color me inspired. If I can put in the same ammount of dedication you did, I hope I can have similar results. I'm just starting out, but I feel empowered by reading things like this - and having a resource as great as Creditnet What ever happened to NextCard anyway. I also had one, but never found out what the deal was.
JUST FYI!!! It's not always easy to keep ANY credit card open after a BK, whether it has a balance or not. Some banks will close your accounts if they see the BK on your CR, mostly during an account review. Even if you reaffirm a cc debt it's no gaurantee they will allow the card to stay open. I and most of the BK filing public completely disagree with the tactic of banks doing this, because if there is not any threat of them having a write off, why close the account? If you reaffirm, you are agreeing to keep the account and pay. You can't file again for 7 more years so what have they got to lose? Same situation of trying to get new credit after BK with a prime lender. SUCKS!!! Anyone contemplating BK be careful. Try to make it part of the re-af agreement; Get it in writing that you will reaffirm ONLY if the bank agrees to keep the account open, and activley report it to CRA's. You can plead that it will give you a chance to rebuild your credit, beginning with that bank if you do not include it in your discharge. Loyalty means something to some lenders these days but don't completely count on it!!
Re: myFICO wants my story-anyone el Just to give a nod to the comments above. I had a providian card, zero balance. They canceled the card shortly after I filed. Here's the kicker - Providian keeps a blacklist of people who have BK'd on them. I'm on that list, not because I owed them any money but because I went BK while having a zero balance on their card. Gorgeous. Expect "back of the bus" treatment when you do a BK for quite a few years. Secured loans are much easier to pull off.
Re: myFICO wants my story-anyone el Dan, I've received that same email from Sue @ myfico about 5 or 6 times now. Haven't responded to any of them.
Re: myFICO wants my story-anyone el Good to hear. I'm reluctant, just wanted to know how weird this was.
Re: myFICO wants my story-anyone el Don't give them nothin'. They're probably fishing for info as to how you guys rebounded so fast after adverse credit histories only to plug that kind of parameter into their mathematical model for future FICO scoring. Meaning, it will screw it up for everyone if someone points them to the yellow brick road.
