Like it or not, your credit score is one of the most important aspects of your financial well-being.

Want to finance a car?

A good credit score will get you a lower interest rate, which will save you a lot of money in the long run.

Want to buy a house?

How well you manage your credit accounts and habits can make or break an entire deal.

Want to get approved for better credit cards with actual perks instead of $99 annual fees and terrible customer service?

Better make sure that credit history is on point.

Personally, I’ve been on both sides of the equation where at one point my score was in the mid 700s.

But today?

Not so much…

Here’s Where My Credit Score Stands As Of April 2025

Before we talk numbers, I just have to say that credit score is not the be-all and end-all of being able to finance purchases.

You can have a 750 credit score as an 18 year old, but it won’t mean much for buying a car, house, or getting a personal loan simply because there won’t be enough credit history.

On the other hand, you can have a long, perfect payment history with a 640 score because your average credit usage is high, but if your income is high enough it won’t matter quite as much.

(this is not financial advice, and your mileage may vary)

That said, here are my current FICO scores:

Transunion: 656

Equifax: 655

Experian: 636

You can also use something like Credit Karma, but those Vantage Score (not FICO) numbers vary quite a bit.

It doesn’t really matter what you use, because either scoring model can give you a good idea of where you’re at.

What Really Matters With Credit Is This

Having worked in car sales and other sales related industries on top of opening dozens of accounts myself, I’ve dealt a lot with finance.

What I’ve found is not many people know about the most important factors of your credit history, which are:

35% payment history

30% credit utilization

15% average credit account age

10% credit inquiries

10 % variety of credit accounts

Essentially, the most important things are never paying late, never missing payments, and keeping running balances low.

You’ll also want to keep your credit accounts open to have a long credit history, so unless you have ridiculous annual fees and the company won’t upgrade you to an $0 annual fee card, don’t close it for any reason.

Then the smaller factors are not asking for credit too often (once per year or less is ideal), and having a good mix of credit cards and installment loans to show more responsibility.

What I Need To Fix For A Better Credit Score

1. My Credit Utilization Is Too Damn High – I don’t like to admit this, but I’m using about 66% of my available credit, meaning I’m carrying high balances on the cards I haven’t paid off yet. Ideally, utilization would be at 6% or less, not 66%. The solution is simply to pay off my balances over time which will result in a dramatically higher score.
   
2. I Have Too Many New Credit Accounts – This causes two problems with my credit report: I now have too many credit inquiries, and since most of these inquiries resulted in new accounts, that lowered my average account age considerably. The solution is to stop asking for more credit for a couple years but unfortunately for my score, I do have one more big purchase to make soon…
   
3. Late Payments From 2018 Show Up On Some Bureaus – Way back when, I had 5 credit cards and couldn’t pay on 3 of them for a couple months which did a number on my score, and even though those cards are now up to date, they’re still a damper on my report until they fall off early next year. The solution is to simply wait it out, although I could have them removed due to discrepancies between credit bureaus.

What I Plan To Do From Here

The truth about credit is it’s really a game of patience and proper management.

Open a lot of accounts over time, keep balances under 6% (ideally 0% while still using them to keep them active), never pay late, never miss a payment, and do this for decades.

While I’m not there yet, simply knowing this is half the battle.

The other half is doing it.

And so all I plan on doing is paying off all my revolving account balances (aka credit cards) and keeping them open and active.

By the time that happens in a couple years, I’ll likely have a solid 750 score and it’ll only be a matter of time before I get in the 800s.

To see my last credit card balance update, read this post next.

Any questions? Let me know.

Talk soon,
-Gabe

I’m not exactly thrilled to share this, but over the last 6 years I went from being debt free to racking up $30,673 in credit card debt.

The craziest part?

I’ve been able to pay off several accounts including credit cards, 16 different Affirm loans, and a $6k personal loan over the last couple years so this wasn’t even peak debt.

That said, I want to share my plan to pay off all these accounts, because it’s been working well so far.

But first, let’s break down what we have to pay.

My Insane Credit Card Debt Breakdown

I’m not including the account names for privacy reasons, but everything you see below is up to date as of 4/1/25 which I update in a Google Sheet on the first of every month.

This is what we’re looking at right now:

Credit Card	Minimum Payment	Balance
Account 1	$30	$198
Account 2	$25	$561
Account 3	$28	$781
Account 4	$47	$908
Account 5	$93	$968
Account 6	$50	$960
Account 7	$30	$957
Account 8	$37	$1,085
Account 9	$43	$1,072
Account 10	$39	$1,095
Account 11	$30	$1,137
Account 12	$29	$1,337
Account 13	$71	$1,640
Account 14	$67	$1,918
Account 15	$80	$2,378
Account 16	$122	$2,401
Account 17	$100	$2,574
Account 18	$150	$2,627
Account 19	$80	$2,960
Account 20	$115	$3,116

The first thing you’ll notice is the fact that we have 20 accounts with balances, which has been absolutely crazy to manage but we’ve been making it work.

How I Got In So Much Debt In The First Place

Before I get into our very simple plan to pay off these cards, I wanted to briefly mention how I racked up so much debt which was a combination of several things:

1. During 2020 when the job market was actually insane, we pretty much lived off unemployment, my tiny email marketing business, and credit cards.
2. In 2023 my then-pregnant wife and I packed up the car with our toddler, dog, and everything we could fit and booked an AirBNB for a month here in the Midwest and put everything on credit before I got a job and apartment 3 weeks later.
3. December 30th, 2023 our apartment became unfit to live in with a toddler and infant due to smoke of various plants seeping in, so we booked another 2 AirBNB for 37 days before moving into this house, which is where that personal loan came from.
4. Used and abused Affirm loans to get beds, furniture, TVs, etc. and still had to use credit due to unbearable jobs getting progressively worse with each new job.

Peak credit card debt was around June of 2024, and it stayed pretty level until recently when we used our tax refund in March 2025 to pay off the rest of the Affirms and the personal loan balance.

After that was taken care of, we’ve been focused on the debt payment plan:

How I’m Making Our Debt Go Away

The whole debt payment process is quite simple:

Stick to Dave Ramsey’s Debt Snowball system as closely as possible.

We pay minimums on every single account, except the one with the lowest balance.

We carry over all the previous minimum payments of paid off accounts to the lowest balance account, so instead of paying $30 per month on Account 1 in the list above…

We SHOULD be paying $550, which means that account would be paid off in 0.36 months…

And most months we can, but sometimes we can’t so our modified version is simply paying as much as we actually can on the lowest balance account.

Even without being able to follow the system perfectly, we’ve still knocked out a ton of accounts and are well on our way to paying everything off.

If everything stays even mostly on the plan and no crazy expenses come up, we should be credit card debt free by March of 2027!

(Being real here, we’re going to put every penny of any potential tax refund into paying this off too)

Then we gotta figure out my wife’s student loans and our admittedly ridiculous car payments…

How Are You Handling Debt?

To be clear here, I’m not a financial advisor and this is not meant to be taken as financial advice.

I’m simply sharing what has been working for us to hopefully inspire you to keep going even when it feels like you’re drowning in debt.

And if you’re not tracking your debt, I highly recommend looking up a debt snowball type Google Sheet template and updating it every month to get a real picture of whats going on.

Even if you’re only down $10 down from last month, it’s still $10 down.

Any comments or questions? Let me know below.

Talk soon,
-Gabe