Way back then, I made all the classic rookie mistakes: Missing credit card payments. Forgetting to pay a hospital bill that ended up in collections. Ignoring a few (okay, dozens of) parking tickets. Going over my credit card limit. Applying for too many cards all at once.
Basically, I was a dumb college kid who had absolutely no idea how important credit is. I thought, no big deal. I’ll pay twice as much next month. Or, after I graduate college I’ll make plenty of money to pay this stuff off. I might have been getting an A in my Advanced Critical Theory in Modernist Literature class, but I was earning a big fat F in the real world.
Eventually I did realize that I’d dug myself into a very deep hole. And so I graduated college with my hard-earned English degree, no practical job prospects and a couple thousand dollars in past-due debt. This, finally, was my big wake-up call.
I was lucky enough to land a decent-paying job soon after graduating. So I spent the next several years methodically paying all of my bills on time, examining my credit reports for inaccuracies and paying my credit card bills off in full each month to boost my score. And of course, I had to pay off all my old debts first. By the time I hit 28, my credit was in pretty good shape. I had a score in the mid-700s and I was able to buy a house with my husband.
The moral of my story is, it took me YEARS to repair the damage I’d done, and I could have avoided it all if I’d treated my credit score with a little respect. Sure, it could have been a lot worse. But I definitely could have saved myself lots of stress, time and money.
