Fair. Fair as an adjective is defined as free from bias,
legitimately sought, neither excellent nor poor, and my personal favorite for
this post, moderately large; ample.
There’s one very large obstacle that I rarely allude to,
talk about, or even reference, because I haven’t had the courage to deal with
it yet. So, after getting back home from a two-day vacation, going to the gym,
and cooking lunch, I finally decided to sit down (to be honest, I was already
sitting down) and check out my credit situation.
In that past ten years, every account with my name on it has
been delinquent in the severest of terms. My student loan balance, which
defaulted over a decade ago, was over $30,000 when I last looked at it. I had
made payments for a couple years after that, but I knew the balance would be
scary. All forms of credit I had built up in my previous sobriety had been
maxed out and never paid, and all utility bills and other debts including a
negative bank account balance were in collection status, as evidenced by my
refund for both Federal and State taxes being recaptured for…. Ever.
I thought about all of this as I was entering my evidence on
to the Credit Karma website, and prepared myself for the worst. What I saw was,
literally, fair. I did a double-take. I checked to see if it was me that this
site was referring to, and it was. Two scores popped up. The one from
TransUnion wasn’t that great, but better than I expected at 574. The Equifax
score was better, and there was a word that stuck out to me under the score of
667 that I thought couldn’t apply to my life of chucking my credit in the
toilet; fair.
I dug a little deeper. Trans union showed one derogatory
mark from a utility bill from when I lived in Fountain, and that was it. Equifax showed zero delinquent accounts, and
both credit reporting agencies showed all of my student loans as closed, and
many of them were closed with the balance paid in full. Of course, there were a
number of loans with a remaining balance, but they still all said closed.
I’m not sure I fully understand what exactly happened or
why, but it kind of looks like I have a second, rather a third, shot at building
some sort of credit. So, I took the next logical step and applied for a credit
card, non-secured, for which I was approved, for a small line of credit. Don’t blow this. Now I have to start the
process of spending $20 per month on the card and paying it off, and slowly my
limit will raise, and my credit can begin to head even farther in the right
direction. This doesn’t mean I’m ready to go apply for a car loan or anything,
it’s far too early for that. It does mean that I am thinking about the future
possibility of needing good credit, and taking the necessary steps to get just
that.
Wow. Is it just me, or does it seem like a string of good
things has been happening to me? Or is this some cruel joke, and the creditors
have been waiting for me to apply for credit to find out where I live so they can
send some henchmen after me, and take away all of my worldly possessions? The
student loan people used to send me angry letters, telling me they would seize
all of my assets. I thought that was great because all of my assets back then
were worth a total of $100, and covered in dog hair, human urine, and were
mostly scattered about the floor in a drunken laundry stew, and it would have
been great to have somebody move all of that crap out of my apartment anyhow.
But these days, I kind of like what I have and would like to hang on to it. I
just don’t think that both credit reports would be so consistent with the status of all of those loans if there were
something fishy going on. So whatever it is that has happened, might just be
legit.
If any of you out there have any thoughts or opinions on
this matter, I would like to hear from you either publicly, or privately, to
discuss this matter. You know how to get ahold of me.
