I'll start with a real quick TLDR of a TIFU: Got married 2 years ago, didn't know about my wife's abysmal credit of 540 and was rejected for a mortgage while only having 2 months left in our lease with no option to renew as the house was being renovated.
So on to the credit repair story! My wife makes about 90k a year while I make about 70k. I immediately started making sure she made all of her on time payments as that was the main strategy of our long term game. We had since leased a beautiful home on a lake but it just isn't big enough for us. My kids share a room and I'd really like everyone to have their own space, as well as some additional space for other homely things.
A year into our current lease (July of 2016) we approached the mortgage idea again as her credit was now up to about 585 but it was still too low to get approved so we renewed our lease for 1 more year. Fast forward to January 2017, her credit is up to 590 after continuous on time payments as well as cleaning up some collection accounts (short term loss of credit score, long term gain) and we are now re-approaching the mortgage game as we want to move by July. On to the short term credit improvements! I added her recently as an authorized user on 2 of my cards that have high limits, low balances and within 2 weeks noticed a 25 point increase across all 3 credit scores. Combine this with the recent payments we made that brought her credit card utilization from 60% to below 10% and we also saw an additional 25 point increase within 2 weeks. She is now sitting on a middle score of 630 with a high score of 645 and a low of 620. We'll let that churn for another 4-6 weeks before we can finally go back to the bank, confident we'll get approved for the kind of mortgage we want.
Many thanks to posts and advice from this sub, it's been a stressful couple of years as the results are sometimes not always obvious but it's been very successful in the end.
TLDR: Wife had super bad credit, I had/have great credit. Worked on paying bills on time, reduce credit utilization, added her as an authorized user on my accounts and her credit went up 100 points in less than 2 years. Now qualify for mortgage!
Submitted February 10, 2017 at 08:55AM by chizmanzini http://ift.tt/2lwqUPl
