I want to start with a disclaimer. I am not a lawyer, credit counselor, accountant or an expert on credit repair. I am a normal person, just like you, that has a desire to improve my credit rating so that I can buy a house for my family. I don’t think I have any advantages over anyone else other then the fact that when I set a goal… I work hard to achieve it and I work on it until it’s done… period. I think anyone can have whatever they want in life if they set a goal and never quit working on obtaining that goal until it’s a done deal.

The Rent Payers Syndrome
I am 38 years old. I have been renting every place I have ever lived in for my entire adult life. When I think about how much money I have put into someone else’s pocket, it makes me sick. Just as a quick example, based on purely hypothetical numbers, let’s assume that I have paid an average of $700/month rent for my entire adult life. I think that this is a fairly realistic number even though it’s hypothetical. I started renting when I was 19 years old. It was in June of 1988, if I remember correctly. This means I have been paying rent for 20 years, approximately. Let’s do the math.

20 Years X 12 Months = 240 Months
240 Months X $700 Rent = $168,000 Rent Paid

When I considered this number, I was very motivated to change my habit of paying rent to say the least. $168,000 is a considerable amount of money to have put in someone elses pocket with no return. If I had been paying a mortgage, I would have some equity to show for it. This fact really motivated me to get my act together and repair my credit.

The Struggle
I am probably more fortunate then alot of people in the fact that, until recently, I had never had any credit cards. I could never get approved for one! The only loans I have ever had were auto loans and, honestly, I could never pay one off.

The reasons are a whole list of excuses and circumstance. Some of it was due to a very shaky employment history with no jobs that lasted more then a year or 2. I was laid off, my hours were cut or I was terminated for one reason or another. So I jumped from job to job.

Life is full of ups and downs… especially when you come from a poor family and economically depressed region. The majority of opportunities that we were afforded were meager. This is where I came from. Everyone I considered a friend was poor. We all shared the same struggle. We all went through similar things. We all had terrible credit ratings, lived in rental properties, drove unreliable vehicles and most of us had no health insurance or a family doctor. It was life. We did what we could to have a place to live and food to eat.

Sacrificing credit is a means of survival for alot of people. If you don’t have health insurance, you go to the med center and they give you samples of medications instead of prescriptions and send you a bill for the visit… a bill you probably won’t pay. If you lose your job, you end up not being able to pay the gas bill and it gets shut off (the electric bill is cheaper and you have a couple of electric heaters you can use until they shut off the electricity). You pay what you can and ignore the rest. Alot of poor people view the credit system as a luxury for rich people and since they are rarely afforded credit, when they get it they can rarely hang onto it because they overuse it or circumstance puts them in a position where they can’t repay it.

Bittersweet Success
Fast forward 20 years and you will find that I have struggled my way forward and have overcome the majority of those struggles. I run my own business as a web developer and have a beautiful family. I pay my bills every month. I can’t usually pay them all on the due date because they are almost all due in the first week of the month, but I do pay them every month. I live paycheck to paycheck… just like you probably do.

I usually make around the same income every month but I really don’t have a regular payday for most of my income. My wife and I keep a budget list every month and when I get paid I pick what we can pay and put the rest off until I make more money. The list has all of our monthly expenses and lists the name and amount owed. Recently, I was looking at that list and realized that rent was taking almost 30% of my monthly income. It was just too bad that my credit was so bad I couldn’t get a mortgage.

The Credit Report
If I can pay rent I can pay a mortgage payment. The problem lies in the fact that my credit was a shambles from the years of not even paying attention to it. Lots of old medical bills, unpaid phone bills and a couple of car repossessions from some years ago. My only hope of obtaining a mortgage was to try and repair my credit. I just didn’t know how to do it.

I am sure that all of you have seen advertisements on TV for FreeCreditReport.com. I saw it for the 500th time and finally decided to get my free credit report to see what the damage was. What I found was a mess! There were many items on there that weren’t even mine! I read a bunch of the information freecreditreport.com has on their website and realized that I could dispute these items, so I did. A month later I got an email from Experian that said that they had deleted 6 items! I was inspired! I did alot more research and realized that there were alot of inaccuracies in most of the other items on my credit report. These inaccuracies were a reason to dispute them., so I did. I also learned that you can have any items that are older then 7 years removed as well… so I disputed those too. A month later, Experian informed me that they had deleted all of the old items and corrected the inaccuracies. The end result of this was that my credit score jumped from 539 to 623!

The Big Three
There is alot of information on this blog about the fact that there are 3 major Credit Reporting Agencies.

  • Experian
  • Equifax
  • Trans Union

I learned that I can also get a free credit report for all 3 of these Credit Reporting Agencies by going to http://www.annualcreditreport.com. So I went there and signed up (they don’t require a credit card like FreeCreditReport.com). and got my reports. Needless to say, the same problems existed on Equifax and TransUnion as I had first seen on Experian. I disputed everything I disputed before and a couple of new items that didn’t show up on the Experian report (including a Public Record that was from 1999 where I was sued for the balance of a car that was repossessed). 30 days later, these items were corrected or deleted.

After I had gotten most of the bad stuff corrected or deleted I wanted to check my credit scores again. Unfortunately, annualcreditreport.com doesn’t give you the scores! I had also read that FreeCreditReport.com doesn’t give you your actual scores. Instead, they give you what I learned are FAKO scores. After a little more research I found a discussion forum at creditboards.com that had a TON of great information and knowledgeable people on the subject of credit repair. They explained that only a few services give you your actual FICO Score (sometimes referred to as a Beacon Score). One of the best ones I found was MyFico.com. There are discount codes available on creditboards.com that will give you a 20% or better discount when ordering your reports.

This Site is For Education
Since I started working to repair my credit I have learned alot. I decided that I would start this site so that I could assist in helping other obtain the same success I have seen to date in improving my credit. I do have some advertisements on here but it costs real money to host a website. Please visit some of my sponsors if you find any of the information I have here as helpful. There is alot more to come. :)

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