Learn From These Credit Score Success Stories

It can happen to anyone: Miss just a credit card payment or two and the next time you check your credit score, you’re stunned to find a low number that makes lenders shun you.

But with patience and discipline, you can move that score from the depths to the stratosphere.

We talked to several people across the country who dug themselves out and brought up their credit scores in a big way — sometimes in just one or two years.

We asked them to pass along their best tips to share with folks who might be dealing with the low-score blues.

Melissa Chinwah
Homewood, Ill.
Credit score before: 348
Credit score after: 702

Tips for Maintaining a Good Credit Score

Credit score danger zone

Rock bottom: After getting divorced, Chinwah, an office manager, was shocked to find that her credit score had sunk to an average of 348, with the lowest reported score among the three bureaus at just 316. There were 43 collections and a repossessed car on her report — “Not one thing was positive, except for my student loan,” she said. “I started to look for housing for me and my two small children and no one would even look at me.”

Turning point: Melissa started researching the ins and outs of her credit report on the forums at MyFICO.com, where people shared their tips for raising their credit scores. For example, she learned that being 120 days late on a payment is basically the same as being repossessed, according to a credit bureau. “The average layperson doesn’t know these kinds of things,” she said.

Her motivation: “The motivation was I needed a place to live,” she said. “I was 44 years old at the time, and I had to start all over anyway.” When Melissa’s credit score reached 648, she applied for a mortgage and bought her dream house.

Lessons learned: Melissa approached building her credit like a part-time job. “Every day I would promise myself I would look at my score on my lunch break, and I would make myself do something, like write a goodwill letter,” she said. Melissa wrote a lot of letters and made phone calls to lenders after paying her debts, asking them to remove blemishes from her report. She was persistent in her efforts over the course of two years and was successful in getting at least 15 collections removed.

Her best advice: “Patience is one thing you must have,” she said. “There’s no magic pill, no magic wand. You have to sit down, make those phone calls and pay your bills.”

Paul Seago
Apopka, Fla.
Credit score before: Less than 500
Credit score after: 785

Rock bottom: “I got out of graduate school in 1998. By 1999 and 2000, paying bills on time wasn’t that important to me, so they’d pile up,” said Seago. “And I’d be 30 days late or 60, sometimes 90. A couple of those piled up. All the sudden I thought, ‘Look, I’m going to want to buy a car someday, get married and buy a house.’ I couldn’t do those kinds of things with the score I had.”

Turning point: “One of the first things I did was start paying everything on time,” said Seago, president of the Apopka Area Chamber of Commerce. “I set up a auto bill pay so I’d never be late again. The easiest thing to do is start paying your bills on time. The late payments came off eventually. Then I’d pay extra on my bills — more than the minimum — so my debt ratio would go down. I got rid of all my store cards and kept all my major credit cards.”

His motivation: “I just buckled down and wanted to get [my score] turned around,” he said. “At some point, I’d be married and looking at a house, and I could just see that played out someday, sitting down with a mortgage broker looking at my credit and [the broker] saying, ‘Yeah, you can’t have a house.’ I probably looked at my score every four months, and I’d see it go up. It’s like when you’re dieting and you see yourself losing a bit of weight.” Seago is now married and in the process of looking for a house.

Lessons learned: Seago researched credit score advice online and in magazines. His major focus was on making payments on time. “If you find yourself in trouble and you’ve got a low score, you can’t spend your way out of it,” he said.

His best advice: “No. 1, as simple as it sounds, is just pay on time. Pay a little bit extra every month to get that balance down. And don’t get any more cards. Do whatever you’ve got to do to pay them off and keep your balances down.”

Fiona James
Baton Rouge, La.
Before: 422
After: 512

Rock bottom: She knows she’s got a long way to go before her credit score can be called excellent, but she also sees that she’s come a long way from when things were their darkest. “When I first went to college, everyone was offering me credit cards,” said James. “A few years later, I was getting behind on bills and not being able to afford certain things and taking out loans. I went to get a vehicle in 2008 and realized my credit score was way low.”

Turning point: James started following the advice in the book “Good Debt Riches,” by Elon Bomani. She had a lot of cards with small amounts of debt and began paying those off, slowly working on lowering her debt.

Her motivation: James was motivated by her need to get reliable transportation so she could work at her two jobs. “I went for six months without a vehicle,” she said. “It was actually quite difficult.”

Lessons learned: “I applied some of the basic principles of paying off creditors where I had a small balance, then began to work out payment arrangements with other creditors,” she said. “I also invested in a secured credit card that reported to all three major credit bureaus and made sure to pay them on time and off each month.”

And though she’s managed to lift her score nearly 100 points, she knows that her work isn’t nearly done. “Each day, I am still working towards repairing and rebuilding my credit as well as becoming financially sound,” she said.

Her best advice: “I would honestly have to say first and foremost to have faith that you can do it,” she said. “The end results are far greater than what you’re dealing with at that particular time.”

Tips from the top
We also talked with David C. Jones, president of the Association of Independent Consumer Credit Counseling Agencies, and Gail Cunningham, vice president of public relations for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, to get their best tips for building credit.

Here’s what they had to say.

* Check credit reports regularly. At least once per year or three months in advance of applying for a loan or credit, check your reports, which are free annually through AnnualCreditReport.com. “Dispute any incorrect entries,” Cunningham said. “Make sure it’s about you and only you.”
* Pay on time. It seems simple, but paying on time is the highest weighted component of your credit score, accounting for 35 percent of the score, according to Cunningham. “If you’re a procrastinator, unorganized or if you travel for work, set up automatic bill pay in an amount that will at least pay your minimum [payment] by the due date,” she said.
* Don’t max out your credit. Aim to use no more than 30 percent of your available credit to avoid costly fees and being put into a risk category. It’s also a good idea to pay down your cards. “As your cards are paid down, it is likely that you will see an improvement in your credit score, as the computation takes into account your ability to repay your debt more easily,” said Jones.
* Be careful about closing unused accounts. Have a few credit cards paid off that you don’t want to use anymore? You might be better off keeping them open. “Closing unused accounts will lower your overall available credit and negatively impact your credit utilization ratio,” explained Cunningham.
* Resist paying for everything on credit. “Chances are that using cash more often will make you a better steward of the money you have each month after paying necessary bills,” Jones said. “As your spending patterns improve, so will your credit score.”

Now, more than ever, there is an imperative need for people to understand the nature of credit in a capitalist society. In a time when we are seeing the high seas of finance increasingly rocked by rolling crisis and systemic instability, from Enron to the sub-prime mortgage debacle to the dot.com bubble to the asian financial crisis- in such a time it is imperative that average citizens develop a useful critique of the way credit functions in the global economy. Full text of the video can be read at: kapitalism101.wordpress.com
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Hospitality Sales & Management International


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Sales Management: More, Better, Faster Requires Change

I’ve been doing some prospecting lately and found that every CEO and Sale Manager I speak with has issues with their sales, but few want to do anything significantly different about their sales issues.  Sure they want everybody to do more, better and faster.  However this is the classic definition of insanity – doing the same thing and expecting different results. 

Managers don’t want to change.  They live in the hope it will get better, or they make excuses, or they use the work harder tactic.  Whipping your horse that feels he’s going all out doesn’t work, and feeding him high energy motivation doesn’t last.  It’s better to teach the horse a different gait (if he’s capable) and then maybe he can go faster, do better, and accomplish more. 

Here is the key to your success.  Your sales will grow only as fast as you grow.  In other words;

1. Do something different
   a. Have a different kind of meeting, phone conference or review.
   b. Read a book and deploy 2 ideas.  I recommend Take Me To Your Leaders.
   c. Hire someone to run a teleseminar with one specific topic and then discuss how all of you will implement it.  Majority rules.
   d. Analyze each sale and lost sale.  What worked?  What didn’t work?  Then reinforce what worked and start implementing the opposite of what didn’t.

2. Buy Help
You ask your clients to buy your expertise.  How come you resist buying expertise for yourself?  Ego??  Face it if you knew what to do you would have done it already.  You like most people in sales learned by trial and error.  Since closing ratios average less than 33%, the errors dominate.  So admit it, you do not have the answer, the time, the energy, whatever. Something is missing.

Then there are the excuses of why not to buy help. 

Budget??  I don’t think so.  How many additional sales would it take to justify a M, M, M, …, investment??

Or, time out of the field??  Maybe, since average sales people have to spend 2-3 times longer than better sales people to make a sale.  Why you’d actually save expense account money by bringing them in for something to change their behaviors vs. wasting time and money on useless sales calls and blown opportunities.

Yeah, this is tough talk, but wake-up and do something different.  Otherwise, you’ll maintain your position and float down and up with the economy against competition – assuming competition does nothing.

So here’s an action item for you.  Do it now!!

Voice what’s on our mind regarding sales – your issues, your concerns, your challenges.  Call me if you’d like.  Say it to a mirror, but you have to get it out of your mouth.  Then you’ll hear it for yourself.  Write it down and now ask yourself, “What can I do about it.  Listen from within for answers and/or sleep on it until the answers come.  If you listen they will come.   If you don’t they won’t

Once these ideas start surfacing, again, writing them all down.  It’s critical to see them with your eyes.  Eliminate the least acceptable and select 2-3 good ones.  Commit to a date to complete each.  Speaking it, listening to it, and see it are all critical component for you to grow. 

So go out and make some changes.

Now I invite you to learn more.

Start Enjoying Norrath Again! Buy Everquest Accounts Online!

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That’s where a professional MMORPG Accounts Store, one from which you can buy WOW Accounts, FFXI Accounts, Eve Accounts, Lineage 2 Accounts, and of course, EverQuest Accounts, is the perfect way to get your motivation back and remember why you started developing everquest accounts to begin with!

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