10 CASE STUDIES OF ACTUAL CLIENTS WE’VE HELPED

1.The client had 7 Student Loans that were 90 days late several times.  He was current on the loans though so I advised him to get his student loans consolidated into 1 loan.  Once he did that, I lured the lender into a trap when I asked them to validate the payment history.  The lender usually will validate the payment history as being accurate, but with many student loans, they only report the 90 day lates and not the 30 and 60 day lates.  Given that it’s impossible to be 90 days late without also being 30 and 60 days late, my argument was that the lender violated the FCRA by validating inaccurate information.  The reason I first had the client consolidate and pay off the loans was 2-fold.  I knew it would increase the score by reducing his number of installment accounts from 7 to 1, but also because I knew the lender wouldn’t put up a fight in deleting these accounts since they were already satisfied and there was no more money to make.  The lender would rather delete the account than risk an FCRA lawsuit and in this case deleted the 6 accounts.  This took 90 days from start t finish to get the result the client wanted.

3. The client had a 672 middle credit score but needed a 720 to qualify for the loan she wanted.  The problem was, she only had one 30 days late payment from 3 years ago and I knew that would only increase her score 15 to 20 points if I were to get it removed.  She did however have a maxed-out credit card that she was listed as an authorized user on from her Father.  She had two other credit cards solely in her name that was only about 25% utilized.  I told her to have her Father remove her as an authorized user and then requested that the credit bureaus remove the account from her report.  Once I got the account removed her score went from a 672 to a 725.  I was able to get the 30-day late payment removed a month after that and her score increased again to 743.  She was able to get the preferred rate she was looking for.

5.We had a couple hire me that was wanting to refinance their interest-only loan that was going to balloon from 3.5% to 8.5% in four months.  The husband needed 32 points and the wife needed 28 points in order for them to qualify.  They were 63% utilized on their credit cards and held all of their credit cards jointly.  They didn’t have the funds to pay down the balances and they had no derogatory items on their credit.  They owned a business though that was established.  They told me that they use their personal credit cards for the business.  We advised them to contact their bank and see if they could get approved for a business card since they use their personal cards for business.  Two of the banks said yes and opened up a brand new business credit card for them in the business name that didn’t show on their personal credit.  One of the two banks required that they close the personal card but it didn’t matter because both business cards had limits high enough to pay off all of their personal credit cards.  Both of their scores increase by 65 and 72 points to put them well over the score they needed to get refinanced at the preferred rate.

7.We had a client whose credit score dropped over 100 points in a month but there were no new derogatory items on her credit report, just two collections from several years ago.  I noticed that the score drop was due to a single collector updating the date of the last activity to the current date.  I was able to get the collection completely deleted and the score updated within 10 days.  The client did have to settle the collection, but it was for only 30 cents on the dollar

9.We had a client who co-signed for a boat that was repossessed two years later.  His credit was perfect until the loan for the boat went into default.  I noticed that the original lender sold the loan to a new lender during the two years since the boat was purchased so I decided to challenge the validity of the loan and raised the question as to whether my client signed for the loan in the first place.  The new lender was not able to produce the original contract showing where my client signed and I was able to get him out of the loan all together along with the item deleted from his credit report.  The process took around 60 days to accomplish, but his score went up 110 points as a result.

2. We had a wealthy client that wanted to buy a house in Laguna Beach for 4 Million dollars.  The problem was, the client already had 3 other mortgages on other homes he owned and a ton of inquiries as a result of his heavy credit usage.  His business manager dropped the ball in paying his bills and two of the mortgages were paid 30 days late.  He needed at least a 680 score to get approved but his score was only 595.  Both of the mortgage lates were recent and hurting his score quite a bit.  I knew he would be at 680 if I were to get both off, but knew we would fall short if I only got one removed.  Unfortunately, I was only able to get one removed and his score only went up to 632.  While I continued to attempt to remove the other mortgage late, I noticed that the client had a very high credit card balance on both American Express and Citi.  The client told me he pays those in full every month.  I told the client to call both cards 5 days before the statement closed and find out the balances and pay them in full 5 days early in order the assure that the statement closed with close to a zero balance.  Given that most credit card companies report the balance on the statement closing date, this caused the balances to show as only a few hundred dollars each rather than the normal tens of thousands they usually show as.  Needless to say, I never got the other late removed, but this little tweak along with the mortgage late I did get removed ended up giving the client a 705 credit score and he got the loan.

4.We had a client that didn’t know he was a victim of identity theft until he applied for a loan to buy a house with his new wife.  Her credit was fine but she didn’t make enough money to get the loan on her own so we needed to get his credit fixed fast.  I was able to get all 5 fraudulent accounts deleted completely from his credit report within 14 days and his score went back to where it was before the fraud and they got approved to buy their new home.

6.We had a couple hire me that were looking to buy a house but were both mid 600’s with their credit score.  I noticed that both of them were 60 to 70% utilized on their credit cards but also saw that they both had their own credit cards and that none of them were held jointly.  The wife was the breadwinner and able to qualify on her own without the husband.  Both of them also had a few collection accounts from their college days that were 4 years old.  The goal was to get her to 720 within 45 days.  I told her to have the husband max out his credit cards to pay down hers and I was able to get two of the three collection accounts off within 30 days while the balances on her cards updated to the credit report.  The lower balance on her credit cards combined with the small increase the older collections gave her once they were deleted combined to give her a score boost of 85 points.  She got the loan on her own.

8.We had a client that needed a 65 point credit score boost in order to qualify for preferred interest rates on a home loan.  He only had a single 30-day late payment from 4 years ago which at most was hurting his score 20 points.  The house he was planning to sell had a lot of equity and his credit cards were 50% utilized.   We advised him to obtain a home equity loan on his current home that he was planning to sell and to use that money to pay off the credit cards he had.  We were also able to get the 30-day late payment removed in the interim. Once his credit card balances updated, coupled with the removal of the 30-day late payment, his score went up 73 points and he got approved for the preferred rate.

10.The client needed a 540 to get a car loan.  His score was only 495.  We were able to remove 3 medical collections that were reported in error due to the collector reporting it before the medical bill was 6 months old.  We got the items removed within 2 weeks and his score went up to 565 and he got the car loan.