I hit a deer with my Lightning. Body shop did a poor job in repairing the damage. Decided...what the heck, I am going to buy a vette.

Went to my local chevy dealer, paid too much and financed $45k.

I am self employed and am very vehicle heavy. Two vans, a box truck, a bucket truck and a Focus! My credit score always ran between 680 and 725 depending on my credit card usage.

Just because I could afford the payments.... just because I could get financed... just because I wanted this car, my credit is now 580 and it is staying down there!

GMAC will NOT finance a truck for me with the good rates! YIKES!

So, my choice is sell the vette, or pay it way down. I guess I will pay down $20k in the next few months to see if that helps! If not... vette gotta go!

 

hey, we all have made mistakes :o . me included (in my younger years) . admitting an error in judgement and learning from it is an important life lesson. you will work it out, i'm sure. good luck!!!

 

To give you a heads up I'm a finance guy with auto loans. Multiple car loans don't lower your score, multiple new accounts will. Getting rid of one or more of those cars wont increase your score, neither will paying their balance off.. Only time with the current accounts you have. Now paying off an older car loan early will help but not as much as some other things.

If you need a quick boost there are a few tricks, pay down your credit cards. Revolving balance accounts for about 80-100 points in score, if you have 0 balance on all cards your score is 80 points higher, maxed out 80 points lower. Credit cards are the worst thing to happen to people since cancer, we have been trained to use them daily and it does nothing but hurt you.

Exploit the old authorized user method. If you are credit card debt heavy but must have a loan or just have a lack of well seasoned trade lines. Have a relative (or wife, alot of married couples don't share their good credit because they don't know they can) add you as an authorized user to their oldest credit card accounts, the higher the limit the better. The show up instantly and you receive credit for the entire life of that card (past and future) but you can pull it off your credit at any time if need be. If you have good credit but high CC balances and cant pay them before you need a new loan this is your best bet.

Run all three bureaus online. Use truecredit, they are the cheapest and allow you to dispute on the spot. Dispute any incorrectly reporting items (on all 3 bureaus) and if your in a real pinch dispute anything negative what so ever (not completely ethical but hey...), some will pop off if they are older and the current ones will be in a state of limbo that wont hurt you as bad, but after 30 days they will be back to their former state if they are correct.

Credit management is so hard for people to understand, its a broken system that needs to be revamped but there are people that can work it.

If you need further help, PM me and I will give you my work number. I wont post again in this thread because of random asses that flame every single post with "and I'm better than you because I pay cash" whenever finance questions come up.

 

great info for those that need to know.

 

I'm not much into credit (fortunately) but if I had a credit problem I couldn't bring myself to leach-off a relative's good credit. Nor would it make much sense for the relative to place a 'credit-risk' person on their account as an authorized user....I wouldn't want to do it. It may be advantageous for the debt-ridden person but I don't like the sound of that deal from either party's perspective. If I dig myself into a hole...I'll dig myself out. It might take a while but I'd clean up my own mess.

I guess the concept of reducing and eliminating debt doesn't fly well with people much anymore. Everyone wants that immediate gratification whether they can afford it or not.

 

Some of us WORK for a living...haha...then again I wonder just how many people with your type of comments actually back them up, and how many are just "talking"....hmmmm

 

Thanks Abomination! I'm a walking paycheck, but my wife'll be interested in your post.

FM

 

Good info, Abomination!

 

Best way to maintain a good credit score is to not borrow more than you can comfortably afford and pay your bills on time. If you follow those two simple rules you will never have to resort to fugazy tactics to get yourself out of a hole.

 

Amen.

The sagest advise of 'em all, hands-down.

 

Terrific info for those needing a good credit score or just wanting to understand the system. Thanks for sharing!

 

I have over $750k in gross sales projected in 2007 and will have gross sales over $1 million for 2008. I DO pay my bills on time and CAN afford the $850 payments per month.

It is the punishment of the credit bureaus that give me a 580 for using credit all over the place.

Example... I use my Amex cards to over $10k a month each. Pay off each month. Did you know THAT does NOT reflect on my score! NNNOOOO!! I always show a $10-20k balance for just that account.

I did NOT need your opinions of me. I was trying to help out anybody thinking of splurging for a new expensive car.

I am poor as obviously compared to all of you, but I clear around $10k a month. My goal now is to use all of my left over money and clean up the debt issues.

 

I can speak from experience with some of this. I'm very **** retentive about my credit and monitor it like a hawk. I bought my new 07 in December 06. At the time my credit score was around 750. Great huh? At least I thought it was. Dealer shopped around and after enough stinkin inquiries it went down but not by too much. Not a big deal. I got a decent interest rate even with putting nothing down on this car.

In January I hired a professional job placement agency (big mistake but I won't get into those details). Their fee was around $2400 and they made a big sales pitch with their 6mo same as cash financing through GE. I knew I can make that up with a signing bonus so I went for it. Of course I didn't think about it but that meant opening up another line of credit and another inquiry. Score dropped again so now I'm looking at a lower score. According to the credit bureau it was just another credit card.

March rolls around and I'm thinking it's about time to stop throwing money away each month in rent and buy a house. Here come more inquiries by mortgage companies when I'm shopping around for a loan. I'm now looking at possibly going below 700 on my score which really annoyed me that even my own bank dinged my credit twice from the same bureaus which I wound up disputing anyway.

So between all those inquiries and new lines of credit my score dropped almost 50 points. I finally said screw it on the mortgage for now, paid off GE and closed out that account, and waited for some old inquires from more than two years to start dropping off. Even after 30 days my score started to improve but it's still not where it was when I started. I've also learned that keeping my high limit credit cards at no more than 10% revolving balance has helped but I try to pay them off each month as well.

I've also used TrueCredit monitoring and it's decent. I switched to my bank's monitoring service though simply out of convenience. But whatever service to use just make sure you're getting all three bureaus data and not just one. This country's credit system is a mess!

 

I was responding to the tone of the thread in general, not your post specifically.
However, if you don't want people to form opinions maybe you would be better off keeping your financial information to your self rather than posting it on a public forum.

 

This thread got a little off the original post, ease-up guys. .

 

Great information.

But I always pay cash.

 

 

Sorry man but if you don't want opinions.......don't post.

 

There are other things that can affect your credit score without you doing anything. I have four small credit accounts; 1 home equity loan, 1 signature loan, 1 vehicle loan (not the vette) and 1 credit card that got paid off every month. With that I was running a FICO of about 780.

Over the past year, several financial institutions merged. They all had different formats for their account numbers. Well, sometime during the first quarter they decided to put all the different account numbers into the same format and then they reported the credit to the bureaus. And, by the way, they also changed the name of the institution under which the credit information was reported. Since I had three accounts, when they reported for the three existing accounts I had, it looked like I had just opened THREE NEW ACCOUNTS and I took a 10% hit on my FICO. Didn't make me happy.

 

Did you dispute that? I would have.