Five charge-offs, one calm plan, and a 184-point swing
Yasmin's profile read like a hard year — because it had been one. Five accounts in collections, two charged-off cards, and a pandemic-era SBA balance she had been quietly paying every month. The score told one story. The behavior told another.
The mid-FICO was 548 when she came in. Three of the five collections were inside the reporting window and accurate. Two were old enough to challenge on procedure. The two charged-offs had both been settled but never updated on the bureaus.
She was also a year and a half into rebuilding the salon, with bookings up 40 percent year-over-year and zero capital to put behind it. Two payroll providers had already declined her on bureau pulls.
The frustrating part wasn't the file. It was that nothing about her operation matched what the file said about her.
The platform separated what was accurate-and-fixable from what was inaccurate-and-disputable, and worked both tracks in parallel. Settlements that had been honored were re-reported. Disputes that were procedural got written, signed, and tracked. New trade lines were opened to give the file something to age.
- 01Filed 11 disputes — 4 on procedural grounds, 4 on accuracy, 3 on identity-mismatch issues
- 02Pushed 2 settled charge-offs to update from 'open' to 'paid settled' across all three bureaus
- 03Opened a secured card and a profile-building line and furnished both for 6 cycles before the next application
- 04Paid down a $4,200 personal balance in four equal tranches, each landing before statement-cut
- 05Held off on every new inquiry for 90 days while the file aged
“I had stopped looking at my profile because every time I did, it just made me feel worse. The plan let me look again.”