I live in an apartment. Pay a decent amount of rent; more than $1000 (R15 000) per month, like, MORE! Los Angeles, resident, remember? I think to myself, since I had been working so hard on improving my credit score, why don’t I work on buying myself a home? Maybe then all these thousands of dollars in rent per year can go towards my own home!
If you’ve been following my story, you know that my credit score building didn’t start until only a few years ago. I started at zero, got a secure credit card and that got me to average score. That’s around the 500s that whole story is in this blog entry. My lovely husband (at the time), Calvin made me an authorized user of one of his credit cards that immediately lowered my score, probably from the bank doing a hard pull (checking my score). Weeks later, my credit score went back up and stayed there. But we had a much higher credit limit on Calvin’a card than mine. Like $10 000. Imagine! My secure card was only $200.
I never used The card Calvin put me on. I had him keep both cards. I am not a credit minded person. I prefer cash and would only use it if it weren’t for how much importance is placed on Credit score in America! I continued to use my credit car for all purchases and paying it back as soon as the charge cleared. A year after I had gotten my secure credit card, I got a check of $50 back. They were refunding me the deposit I’d put down to get the $200 credit score card. All of this is explained in the blog linked to above.
When things went south in our relationship, my sweet hubby, went straight for the joint credit card. He cancelled that! That messed up my score by a few points because now, I have a lower number of credit lines. Number of credit cards, loans, etc is important for your score. They pretty much want you to be i as much debt as possible. That’s the opposite of what I’ve always strived for all my life. At this point, my score was around 650. Decent for a little girl from a farm in Africa!
After I escaped prison, ahem, I mean my marriage , I applied for a second credit card. I had just moved into the apartment mentioned above, it had been two years since I got my first credit card. I was approved immediately with a limit of a couple of thousand bucks. What? Little ole me? I was floored! At this point, my first card’s limit had gone up by a hundred or so at a time. I had made my way up to $700 at this point on that card and it wouldn’t to any higher. Kinda frustrating because I would check other users online and find that they had much better luck with the same lender.
When I got my second card, my score was in the early 700s it was just going up, naturally, by itself haha. No pun intended. I only waited a few months before I applied for a credit line increases with my new bank and they obliged. I was like, dang, I love these guys. In fact, in the beginning, I set up automatic payment with them. I recommend this, even if you will pay per transaction. This will take care of the odd chance you forget to pay or whatever. Your credit card balance will then be paid in full, or whatever you will have preselected. I have mine for full payment because I don’t buy anything on credit, I don’t already have the cash to pay for in full. PLUS! I am cheap as all get out. Probably why my first credit folk aren’t trying to up my limit anytime soon. They’re like btch, for what? You don’t even spend this credit.
With two credit cards, I was getting slight points here and there. 1% if you spend money at Walmart, 1% if you pay for fuel anywhere but at Costco. Here’s the deal! I only fuel at Costco! They have some of the cheapest gas. I’ve got their membership card. Then I went on the road to become a truck driver. At that point, I wasn’t even going to use my car, so even Costco wasn’t really going to be getting my gas money! I didn’t pay my rent using the credit card because it was much too high for my credit limit. I try to keep my usage under 30%. I hear that’s the sweet spot for Debt to Credit Ratio. What I’ve learned is that, if my usage was 20% when they checked me out this month and 22% next month, they will deduct a point or even 4 from my score. They’ll say because my ratio has gone up! True story!
I had my cellphone account on one card and internet on another. Just in case, I end up not using the cards the whole month. There will still be usage and auto pay will take care of payment. I always did use them on food though.
With just these two cards, I’ve managed to get my score to 760. Some companies consider that Very good and some, Excellent! Those are the basics of how I’ve gotten a score that high. Not much usage on my part. Perhaps if you use yours more or get a car note on it, etc, you will get better mileage, so to speak.
I’m content with things the way they are. I do have one more major update on it, but I like to do things in chronological order, so, that story will come up later in the journey.
Thanks for riding this journey with me. Ask me anything, I’ll give you the best answer I know how to.
In the meantime, here are my contacts
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