Its a very complex system of math and rules, but it isn't impossible to ... raise your credit score.

Closing a loan or credit line actually often lowers your score because it lessens the total amount of credit you theoretically could be using, if you maxxed everything out.

Your 'Credit Utilization' is what % of your total maximum possible credit you are using.

So, when you finally pay off a huge loan of some kind... well, that account closes, and now your relative credit utilization probably goes up, because the system is now only looking at say your credit cards, instead of your credit cards + your big loan.

If CC Balance is 30k / 50k Max,

Big Loan is 5k / 500k Max...

You're at 35/550, or 6.3%, very good.

Pay off Big Loan?

30/50, 60%, pretty bad.

Theres no like, reward mechanism that you get in the system, for paying off a large loan successfully, beyond all those payments toward it counting as on time payments.

So basically, you should actually never close down a credit account of any kind, after you fully pay it off, to the extent that you can do that.

Just... use it sparingly and make regular payments, or put the card in a safe, destroy it, who cares, as long as the account still exists.

(big asterisk on that: unless it has some kind of regular due payment just to even have the account, even if you're not using it at all, have no balance on it at all.)

Thats also true because another big factor in credit scores is how long you've had the accounts you have.

It literally does just take time to build up that element of it, time of you making regular payments and never leaving a balance that rolls over into the next month.

I'm not trying to defend this system, its horseshit, truly evil, a mandatory labyrinthine scam that everyone is forced to participate in, which almost everyone loses.

I'm trying to summarize useful advice.

I was homeless for 2 years.

When I finally got a bit more stabilized, I had scores around 520, because yeah, I spent money I didn't have so that I could eat, and not sleep outside in blizzards and heatwaves.

Its now been about 2 years since that point, and I'm up to between 670 and 710, the 3 agencies still considerably disagree as to which accounts I even had... as I got mugged and had my identity stolen multiple times, and I was only able to convince different agencies of different amounts and extents of that... and also crippled by those muggings...

But the point is, its not impossible to rebuild your credit, even while you're living off of only SSDI as I now am.

Its exceedingly dfficult to do so, but not strictly impossible.

You can find real, in depth guides on how all this shit works, but it'd probably take most people a solid week or two of studying it to fully grasp it.