Curvy Jones on: Good is GREAT!

This morning, I have something to celebrate.

Many of you don’t know the financial struggles I’ve had in the last… oh… decade. We’ll just say that. It all goes back to my child rearing days, in which we were so poor we really did eat government cheese. We rarely got Christmas presents… money was just so very tight. When I started making my own money, I couldn’t WAIT to buy WHATEVER I wanted… but my parents had other plans for my money. Sometimes I paid the daycare bill. Sometimes I bought things that needed to be bought for the house. Sometimes I could keep it but then my dad was Mr. TakesTheFunOutOfEverything and insisted I save 75% of my paycheck. This was AFTER the 10% tithe to the church.

HMPH!

Like food, I developed a warped and bad relationship with money. It became more than a means to an end… it was the beginning and end to my happiness. Money meant freedom, to me. Still does.

I wish I hoarded money but I didn’t. When I left for college, I forgot all those lessons my dad tried to teach me about money- pay yourself (save), then pay your bills. You don’t need to buy everything you see. Be responsible with your money and don’t spend it all at once. The second I checked into the dorms, all of those lessons flew out of the window.

Yup, I fell into the trap. The credit card trap. It looks so appealing, when they hand you the form. You fill it out, knowing you ain’t got no gotdang money to pay no credit card bills. And miracle…. I was approved! I immediately went out to buy things I wanted and couldn’t buy, things I don’t even own anymore! A TV, a vcr, some clothes. Books, a jacket with my school’s logo on it. All things I later sold for pennies on the dollar– to pay my credit card bill.

After college, I worked one low paying job after another. I wasn’t paying any bills. Collections companies started calling. I started dodging their calls. Every time I moved, I wouldn’t update my address, so the bills would get returned. out of sight, out of mind, right?

My downfall was payday loans. I could walk into a store and borrow against a future paycheck. At only 300% interest! I had no idea what that meant… just give me money. Oh, but the kicker was that on payday, you paid it back. PLUS the fee. And then you were down again. So you turn it around, meaning you pay off loan and immediately take out another loan against your next paycheck. Soon I had 2 and 3 loans out at the same time, just trying to stay afloat. And then one day the bottom fell out. I had borrowed more than I was making and I wasn’t going to be able to pay them all back. When the checks were cashed, my account would be negative and I would have no money to replenish the account. I had to let everything bounce and then pay everything back.

I had no money for anything and my credit hit the toilet. My student loan went into forbearance, and then into default. My car was repossessed. I was thirty years old with the shittiest credit score I’d ever seen. EVER. Like… low 400′s. Low.

I pulled my credit reports. Page after page after page of collections. Delinquencies. Late payments. Shut offs. Charge-offs. It was a nightmare. I was overwhelmed and to be honest, I did nothing for a long time, until I was introduced to Dave Ramsey.

Who I absolutely HATED, the first time I heard him. Over time, he grew on me. His principles began to make sense. You know who he reminded me of, in a kinder, more gentler, less militaristic sense? My dad.  O_o. Turns out that guy was sayin’ something, all those years. Whatever.

So I started doing Dave’s Debt Snowball, where you take your lowest balance and push money toward it, until it’s paid off. And once that’s paid off, you move to the next, and the next and the next until your debt is taken care of.  It took a few years, but I paid off everything outstanding except for my student loan, which I brought out of collections and current in 2006. I have less than 10,000 to pay back, now. I started with nearly 20K. I paid off the Kia in 2008, making double, almost triple payments for a year. I bought a 2007 Camry just last year, something I never thought I’d be able to do.

Within a few months of clearing up some accounts, I was able to open a cell phone account. Couldn’t do that before. I was on metroPCS (prepaid cellular). I tried to open an account with Wachovia when I first arrived in Atlanta. They took one look at my credit history and said, uhm...no ma’am. Embarassed, I slinked out of that bank and have never been back. I had an internet bank account that I opened at ACE Cash Express and had that for a few years. I started using their Bill Pay service– online bill pay changed my life. I swear! I haven’t had a late payment in… years, probably. Literally.

In 2007, I think? I opened my Bank of America account. And an account with Orange. Last year I opened an account with a credit union. Just a few years ago, I couldn’t PAY to get an account open.  I had bounced  ton of checks and had to pay banks back… I was in ChexSystems in perpetuity, it seemed.

My credit score climbed and climed, as I paid things off and got my finances in line. 505. 550. 590. 600 was a milestone for me. I hung out at 630 for more than a year. For so so SO long, every time I checked my score, it would be hanging out in the ‘Bad’ category. “Fewer than X consumers have a score below this number.’

Yeah. Well. They can suck it.

Today one of my friends happened to mention that she checked her score, which reminded me that I hadn’t checked mine in awhile.  I logged into my best friend, EVAR, MyFico.com. Effing love that site. Not free, but I absolutely don’t trust any other site.  I subscribe to the ScoreMonitor, which lets me know when I get an inquiry, when I rise or fall below a certain threshold, when I qualify for a lower interest rate and especially when anything new pops up. I logged in today to see a number I have never seen before. Suffice it to say I am within 20pts of 700. Which… OMG. If I hit 700, I would throw myself a party!

Not only that but as I was paging through the report, I saw this:

My report has never said that before. All of those yellow bars? That ‘good‘? Has never been there before!  I went a little further to the collections tab. I have never been so happy to see this:

“You have no collections.”  I HAVE NEVER SEEN THAT STATEMENT BEFORE.

This… this, today, makes the last 5 years of scrimping and pinching and not doing anything fun, just to pay off bills and get collections and creditors off my back all worth it. I still have one or two things to clear up, but even with those issues, I am just under 700. Thinking back to that day I bit the bullet and ordered my credit report and saw that horrendously low number and wanted to keel over and die, I don’t think I ever thought I’d be here. And I have further to go… but this is great, for me.

*looks at it again* Good? That’s GREAT.

Curvy Jones is a northerner playing a southerner who is living, working, playing in metro Atlanta.

Curvy Jones

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Tags:  2010 · credit · money · myfico · scorewatch