Need Help Fixing Our Credit

[tommy0330]

Me and my wife are just starting out on our own on fixing our credit. We have recently been paying a credit company to help us fix our credit. It seemed to work for a few months and then the notices seem to slow down alot. So now we are going to start doing all this ourselves. We were paying 160 a month for their services and lately have not seen results. We pulled our credit 10/2009 from equifax credit monitoring service that we were paying for. Should we use this report or should we get another one. We are no longer part of the equifax monitoring service. Our report shows her credit to be a 589 and mine to be about a 560. I recently had a mortgage broker pull our credit to find out if we would qualify for a home and he said our scores were 529 for her and a 517 for me. Is this normal that it can be so much lower than what we say. The broker told me that the only thing that has went on either account was some medical bills that were put on my credit report. I called the company that has the medical bills and they told me that once they are paid that they will remove them from my credit report but would not send me a letter stating that. Should I do this? I have already opted out and tomorrow I am going to call the CRA's and have them delete my previous personal information. What should I do next? If I pay the medical bills will it help my credit score alot or just a little? There are 4 different accounts for medical on my report buy none over 300 each.

[decadude]

Good job on the opting out. I hear a lot of times TransUnion will send you something in the mail to validate yourself. Just send them the appropriate stuff they ask for.

You are about as far long in the journey as I am. The 512 and 517 are likely your FICO scores and what people generally go by in your instance. I could be wrong here but try pulling your fico scores from myfico.com. If your cheap like me just sign up for the free 30 day trial there is also coupon codes you can use to get 20 percent off of the total if you want to sign up for some of their services. I signed up for the 30 day trial and then canceled to just get an idea and I only got my Equifax FICO.

Before you pay it sounds like you have read a lot I would recommend going hardcore on this and reading everything in the Beginner's information section and I mean everything. Knowlege is power and from my findings Trish (To me an allstar on this site) and chane the site admin and likely owner of this site have some veryveryvery valuable information.

I would recommend what they say find out the statue of limitations (SOL) for your state. On your report find the items that are qualified for the SOL for your state. Definitely wait a while before doing this if you just now opted out as well as wait to verify your personal information that you have as much removed as possible the items that are outside the SOL apply the 1 2 punch to those. Read Trish's post the entire post even the replies as there is more valuable info within the thread about the 1 2 punch in the beginneres section. What items that are not outside of teh SOL what I plan on doing is PFD or pay for delete. Realize that a lot of the Collection Agencies (CAs) will often times agree to half the payment but also apply what Trish said in the beginners section for pay for delete.

I think you are doing the right thing in doing this yourself instead of putting something so important in the hands of someone else. Maybe I am not a trusting person but no one person is going to care more about your alls credit than you two. So get er done and good luck