ok this very very very much qualifies as a "1st world problem" but..
So my wife and I wanted to get a new house. The one we have now we bought 6 months into our marriage, pre kids, etc. It's a nice house, but we could use some more room. So we put it on the market.. Bam, we got a cash offer within 4 grand of the asking price in 2 days! Much rejoicing!
So we found a house we wanted..Went to go get "prequalified" for mortgage and all that. Not thinking anything of it.. I knew my wife's debt to income ration was a bit high, (Child care costs put on Credit card, not the smartest move but what's done is done) She's a teacher, 19 years , same school, loves to teach, hates red tape, etc. But because of budget cuts and the like, no raise or COLA for a while now. .. More below the fold
So I knew we would have to include me, but no biggie, I had some credit issues years ago (like 8-9) but had paid those off and cleared it all up. So imagine my surprise when I got my credit score back from the credit union.. 545.
It turns out back in late 2009/early 2010 over 9 credit cards were opened in a 3 month time frame, all various misspellings of my name, addresses I'd never lived at (Most not even in states I'd even ever been in) but the right social.
So now I have to figure out how to get allllll that removed as fast as I can from my credit report, does anyone have experience with that? Any helpful pointers?
I have already done the following:
1) Challenged the debts.
2) Notified the credit scoring agency's of the fraud (they have added alerts to the account that i MUST be contacted to verify new accounts opened)
3) Notified the FTC.
All this happened 3 years ago or so, so all these accounts are now in collections. I called three of the companies this morning already, and all were less than helpful (except to offer me payment terms.. yay)
So any advice?