First of all, I want to thank everyone here for putting together such a great resource. I'll start with a summary of my situation and hopefully I can get some guidance as to the best way to proceed. I am recently married, and before I was married I tended to be rather disorganized in my financial obligations... I've always had money to pay my bills and always paid them eventually, but unfortunately not always on time. As a result I have a credit card and a student loan that each have several 30 and 60 days late notations, and a couple of even longer ones on the student loan. (To contrast, I have two more student loans and a now-paid off car loan that have never been late, because they all had automatic payment options that allowed my disorganized bachelor self to ignore them and still have them paid on time every month.) My wife has taken charge of financial organization and is helping me get whipped into shape, but in the meantime we're planning to buy a car and I don't really want to get rejected for financing. I have two questions: 1) Do I have a better chance with the credit union I used for my previous car loan? Will they look at my total report and just accept/reject me based on that, or will it help me to point out the fact that I always paid them on time and that now that I'm married my payment habits to other creditors will be much better? 2) With the credit card and student loan that have all the lates, is each incident of lateness a separate incident that has to be disputed one at a time, or can I file one dispute for each of those accounts? Also, which dispute letter would be best to use? Thanks!
In the end, your time is best spent handling your finances correctly initially, than letting things just happen and spending time trying to fix them later. The fact that the car loan thru your credit union was never late may help some in getting a new car loan thru them. Did the credit union approve you for your last car loan while your reports were showing the lates? How old are the lates? Are all your accounts current? What are your FICO scores?
My first car loan was approved nearly 6 years ago. I had very little credit history (senior year in college) but what was there was good. I had to have my dad cosign because of so little history. The most recent lates are recent enough that my reports likely don't show yet that I've brought them current. My FICO score is 597. Should mention that I have a balance on my CC of ~60% of my limit, which I will be paying off this month. Also have a few accounts that are very old and never used. I understand their being open can hurt my score. Should I simply close them and ask the creditors to report them closed as soon as possible? Or should I try to get them deleted? My thought is that my score should improve some just by paying off my CC balance, closing old accounts and having no accounts showing as CURRENTLY delinquent. Is that accurate?
Don't close the cards. One of the big components of FICO scores is the balance to available credit ratio. When you close the cards, you decrease your available credit and therefore increase your utilization ratio, which is bad. I'd go to the credit union and talk to them if I were you. First, you have a good history with them. Second, credit unions are often easier to work with. Then ask for additional information if needed.
But once my CC balance is paid off, won't having less available credit raise my score, or at least my creditworthiness? My understanding is that if I have a lot of unutilized credit then new creditors are less likely to extend credit to me, on the chance that I might overextend myself with my other accounts and be less able to pay the new creditor.
