Fix Your Own Credit

About the Author

My name is Dean. I work on computers for a living. In 1999-2001, I drove my credit into the ground.

The Dot-Com boom had just ended, hard, and I was living as if I was going to keep getting paid for a white collar desk job indefinitely. When the boom ended, I could get academic work and/or blue collar work, but that wasn't paying nearly well enough to cover the debts I'd accrued.

I tightened my belt, and wound up working jobs ranging from theater attendant to cab driver, stayed with friends for extended stretches, and more than once, slept in the car. Once it became evident I wasn't going to find work any time soon, I opened my options up to relocating to another city to find work... and I wound up in Washington, DC, once again employed at a desk job.

Along the way, I rang up several charge-offs, an unpaid phone bill, a large number of "late pay" records, and a stack of student loans. I've never paid rent a single day late, ever, but I've been turned down for an apartment quite a few times, and officially, I think my mother still owns my car, although I've paid every dollar of every bill. The finance companies wouldn't make me a loan of any sort, so she signed for it. (Thanks, mom!)

I screwed up five to ten years ago, and I was still paying for my mistakes. I've consolidated and then deferred the student loans. Whenever I have gotten a raise at work, I've taken the additional money in my paycheck, and put it all into savings. I paid the car off this month. But my credit's still bad.

My roommate had good luck with going to a credit specialist, as did a friend of mine from my hometown, so I looked into that. It looked like it was going to be $1000 or so, and it *might* work, and it *might* not. So I looked online. And kept looking. And kept looking some more.

Between a bunch of sites, I pulled together this strategy, which is what I used to raise my credit score 140 points through two rounds of letters in the mail. That worked out so well, I was ecstatic, and wanted to put the strategy online. So here it is.