This story was sponsored by Lexington Law Firm. All the opinions and details expressed below and 100% true…unfortunately.
Early days, I climbed the ladder up to my own personal debt ceiling one ‘$30 Friendly’s dinner with my first steady girlfriend’ rung at a time. I paid the minimums and paid on time; I was a good boy. Plus, that’s about all I could manage on $14,000 a year as a bank teller. Paying the bare minimum on time with my first credit card was all it took to see my credit rating grow stronger than my meager paychecks did fatter.
The ball had started to roll downhill and it was exciting to be young, in love, and flashing plastic. That hill was steep though and at the bottom was a big ol’ ditch, although I didn’t see it from on high.
This imbalance of improving credit, stagnant wages, and little-to-no self-control proved a dangerous financial stew on the buffet line of life, one that many people have unfortunately bellied up to at one point.
Living beyond means — a classic move.
New credit card offers flooded my parent’s mailbox, promising thousands of additional dollars worth of patty melts and motor oil for my ’86 Civic that drank like Charles Bukowski at the racetrack. All that shiny silver and gold plastic meant continued good times for my girl and me. I was young and lived only in the present tense, foolishly thinking that what we had is all there needed to be, and that access to credit was limitless; we could bust out of the Wonka factory in a glittery elevator paid for with other people’s money.
Freedom was dangled in front of my hungry eyes so I signed my name over and over again, without the need to put even a stamp’s worth of my own skin in the game. Soon enough, the minimum payment amounts got larger and the number of them grew. I began paying my credit card bills late or not at all. I was drowning in debit. My credit score plummeted. That’s when I was forced to realize the mess I had made of things.
Freedom, it turns out, is the opposite of what reckless borrowing eventually delivers. My sentence for the crime of irrational credit card exuberance was years of tireless overtime work at new jobs I didn’t like and immense sacrifices during what should have truly been the best years of my life with a new partner, the one who was truly all I needed in the present and future tense.
The invincibility of youth is intoxicating and a complete fabrication. Also a fabrication, some of the items that popped up on my youthful credit report. I mean, didn’t I do enough legitimate damage to it on my own? The inaccurate aspects of my early credit reports were a little overkill, IMHO. I had no clue how to repair my credit and it was suddenly something others were looking at while I attempted to buy a car and lease an apartment.
If only there was a credit repair company like Lexington Law around back when I needed credit repair. Not only could I have had access to financial management tools and credit education to help me understand what my free spending ways would eventually do to my credit, but they could have helped with correcting the unsubstantiated pieces of my credit report puzzle.
And then…
Maybe a decent car would’ve been able to be financed at a reasonable interest rate.
Maybe we could’ve got into the nicer apartment complex instead of the sketchy half underground one bedroom with the neighbor who was a little too into our UPS deliveries.
Maybe I would have learned how to fix my credit and touched up many of the smudges I haphazardly made on my financial self portrait.
After overcoming the debt of youth, I’m debt free now and traveling with world with my kids. You can do it too. Start with the help of a good credit repair company like Lexington Law.
Nowadays, I’m older and a little creakier, but so much wiser. That’s not a bad tradeoff.
I use credit to my advantage today — to accumulate airline miles, free hotel stays, and more — and I never pay a cent of interest but the road that brought me to this point was long and treacherous.
Just some of the places we’ve traveled, debt free, in the past year alone!
It took me, with so much help from my now wife, a solid half decade to get out of the credit card debt hole I dug for myself. We didn’t have the education and help we could have so desperately needed in repairing my credit score by getting the unfair and inaccurate items off the ledger.
If you are struggling with a lagging credit score, and want to repair your credit in the present tense, you may be in luck. Lexington Law is a credit repair service company ready, willing and able to work with you on credit repair and monitoring your credit reports. Don’t wait, get the help you need.
Debt free, with my credit repaired, and at peace with adult life.
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