I have a friend that had been divorced a couple of years when I met her. She had a good job and made pretty good money. While she was married her husband had always taken care of the bills. He was never late with payments. As a couple they had excellent credit (over 800 FICO score). She was on the title of the family RV and her car loan was just in her name.
After the divorce she wasn’t too worried about the bills. She made payments most of the time. She always had the money to make the minimum payment but once in a while she decided to not make a payment and just make an extra payment next month.
Right after the divorce she applied for and got a VISA card in just her name . With the family credit score she got a $5,000 credit limit. Two years after the divorce we were talking about credit scores and she knew nothing about them.
She had four late payments and a credit score of 540. She now had a couple of store credit cards, a VISA card, car loan, and local Tire Company loan.
With her new credit score no one would lend her money even though she did not know it. She was also still on the RV loan that her ex-husband was still paying on time. In this case that turned out to be a good thing.
We started the credit repair on her accounts. First she set up autopay on all her accounts. This would automatically make at least the minimum payment.
Then she waited until she had six months of on time payments on the accounts she had missed payments on. This alone brought her score up to just over 600. She was happy to be over 600.
After on time payments for six months she called both the credit providers that she had made over 30 days late payments to. She explained she had recently gotten divorced and the missed payments had been accidental. She told them that she was working on her credit rating and would there be any way to possibly remove the late payments.
She was very nice to the customer service agent she talked to. All four of the late payments were taken off and her score jumped to the high 700s a couple of weeks later. She was ecstatic.
She admitted that she had messed up and missed the payments. If the Customer Service Agent had not been willing to remove the late payments she would have called back in another month or two and asked again. She would have nicely given them the same story and hopefully gotten a nicer customer service agent the next time.
Customer Service agents in the credit business deal with a lot of grumpy people. They are very aggressively talked to on a daily basis. When you are the first nice person to talk to them today they will try to help you.
Her ex-husband's RV still being on her account was a good thing. The loan was 6 years old loan and never a late payment.
She has educated her kids and a few of her friends. None of them had a clue about how credit scores worked. She has started another great group of Credit Score Watchers. She is hoping to get her score over 800 and to buy a house.