obsessing over scoring like a teenage delinquent

we all have our OCD things…

…mine was hinted at best by a comment i made recently:

you know you’re growing up when you obsess over your score on your credit karma app more than any gaming app on your phone

truth.

and mine has been fucking with me. to the point i filed a dispute with equifax against itself, which might have been a mistake. time will tell.

while i knew a car loan might have a slightly adverse reaction on my credit score, i had no idea it might plummet almost eighty points…but it did. i was within a belch and a holler of seven, and this dropped me down to the way low sixes. it has since started to crawl back up, but the initial EIGHTY-THREE point drop was, to say the least, a bit shocking. especially since it ONLY happened with equifax (credit karma shows you both them and trans union). trans dropped fewer than twenty. but the next week equi bounced back twenty while trans dropped another forty. and so on and so on. like watching a roller coaster, but it effects your finances – pretty dramatically.

as the ufc pointed out, i don’t really NEED my credit score to be anything impressive per say for another few months. ya see, all this started less than a year ago. i was used to my usual “pre-aprroved credit card application” whereby you get a $300 limit, but you start with almost $200 in fees, so your initial limit is barely over a bill. you’re not getting a credit CARD in mail…you’re getting a credit card BILL in the mail. before you even touch the card.

that’s kinda bullshit.

but the one i got then was a $100 fee on a $750 limit. period. yeah, you got a bill, but you had more credit. and boosting your credit is kinda like the lottery…if you don’t play, you can’t win. if you never take out lines of credit to show you can use them responsibly (in theory) your score never improves and you never get your shit together. i was not kosher with jet-skiing towards fifty and not having the credit to get shit my family needed without some older relative co-signing. at this stage in life i ought to be able to handle mine. so this card got me working on it.

but it still has a $100 fee.

while they’ve upped my limit to $1,500 (which is nice although i still haven’t run it up over $500 and typically keep it below $100) it still has a fee. and i’ve seen limits thrown at me much higher from other places sans a fee before my score dipped, so now i just wanna get that back up where it was so when the card comes up for renewal in may i know i can bail with another option, if not just use said options to get them to waive the fee.

time will tell. but for now the roller coaster bullshit has forced me to stop checking so often, which is probably for the best.