How I got my credit over 800 at 25 and built my first home!

When I graduated college and moved to Nashville, I immediately started looking for homes to purchase as I knew I didn’t want to pay expensive rent for 3 years while Nathan was in his doctorate program. I was very realistic in knowing that my style vs budget 2 months out of school would not be on the same page and chose to stay under my budget to make sure I could afford to pay for our food + bills on just one salary. After talking to a lender and getting my credit pulled, I was shocked to see it was in the low 600’s because I had no debt to my name, but soon realized that was the entire problem! 

After purchasing our condo in Nashville, I knew I needed to start building my credit up if Nathan and I wanted to buy a larger home in a few years. I started researching and found that to build credit, you have to open credit cards and pay them off to show your a reliable buyer so I did just that! 

I researched several different cards and only chose ones that had no yearly fees to keep my expenses low, and would work for the places I shopped: grocery store, gas, clothing stores, bills, etc. and used them for every purchase. Here’s the kicker: to build good credit you have to PAY OFF your cards every statement! I did this every single month for 2 entire years and got my credit in the 820’s at the age of 24 and also got Nathan’s credit over 750 since I added him as a user on our daily card. 

When talking with my friends about building credit, they all had no idea how to improve their credit scores and it shocked me how many would buy items they couldn’t really afford on their cards.  While I personally know how hard it is to restrict purchases to only what you could pay cash for, it taught me a valuable lesson on being patient for things and saving. Even though I did put every purchase on a credit card, I was only buying things I would be purchasing with cash which made it simple to pay off the statement every month. 

Fast forward one year and Nathan is about to graduate with his doctorate which led us to our next step to purchase a home. We were very squished in our condo and couldn’t wait to have a yard for our pups so we started looking in Nashville + Knoxville and ended up deciding on building a home in Knoxville prior to Nathan graduating. This year took a wild turn for everyone and COVID presented its challenges on moving cities and jobs, but the exciting part of it all was while going through the lender process of approval for our home, my credit was so high, I qualified for the loan on my own! 

I knew I was taking the right steps paying off my credit cards each month, but never knew it’d be so easy to improve my scores over a lengthy period enough to purchase a home of double the price of our condo in Nashville that I had just enough credit for 3 years prior. My personal experience improving my credit took a long time with tons of research and with professionals like Lexington Law Firm the process can be improved much quicker with their team. Several of my close friends are now looking into the home buying process and are looking for references to help improve their credit before taking this large life step and I couldn’t recommend the team at Lexington Law Firm enough!