Hello, we recently bought a house at the beginning 2019…bought a car at the end of 2019. Score was over 700 AFTER car purchase…we were late on our credit card payment (once) and paid the late fee…then I needed to upgrade the car we had; requested credit was given approval for $35k…dealership ran HARD credit…decided it was not a good deal.
Now score has dropped almost 200 points!!! OMG, I almost fainted…what the heck happened? We worked so hard to get up there…and the simulator showed we could only recapture about half of what we lost if we pay the card off entirely!!!
This is so unfair…please; what do we do??
It’s all about paying on time… if possible, have automatic payments set up for all your outstanding debt so you won’t be late again.
Time is your friend, however… the longer you keep making on-time payments, your score will go up. I learned not to trust those simulators, they can be all over the place. Many people are using Experian Boost by tying their utility payments into their credit history so maybe that’s something for you to consider.
Credit scores will make you crazy- not enough debt and your score drops. Too much debt and it drops. Experian explains it here and as you can see, the first of the 5 things to affect credit is missed payments https://www.experian.com/blogs…-your-credit-scores/
