I just spent 3 months getting over 20 derogs removed from my credit file. Damned FICO went DOWN 40 points!!!! Before I had 28 derogs and 23 non-derogs. Now I have 9 derogs (2 in dispute still) and 7 non-derogs with the non-derogs well over 10 years old. I have two active credit cards with 87% usage (one is a home equity line), total debt about $14,000. Even the Mortgage is gone!!!! I would have been better off just leaving it alone. Since all the derogs come off by themselves in 2005 I guess my FICO then will be zero, Any solace out there? Any words of wisdom on how to get the FICO back up?
Without knowing more of the details, I suspect what happened is that with the removal of quite a few tradelines (both with derogs and without): 1) You lowered you overall debt-to-credit limit ratio 2) You decreased the age of your oldest tradeline, thus decreasing your credit history 3) You decreased your average age of tradelines 4) You removed specific tradelines, such as the mortgage that generally raises your scores (unless there are recent late payments reporting) Not making any judgements, but there's more to raising your scores than just removing derogs and old tradelines. Rather, you have to be quite succint in your method. For example, removing a 15 year old credit card tradeline that has a $10k limit, an average 20% usage and 3 lates 4 years ago may sound like a good idea, but it would probably hurt more than help.
I removed as many derogs as I could, all derogs go back to 1997 when I filed CH13, discharged 2001. The non-derogs removed went back pretty far, most of which were not mine anyway. I didn't dispute the mortgage, but now it's gone (I suspect it will be back next month, they report monthly. But still.... 40 points????
