If you thought waiting for the Windows hourglass to go away was a test of patience, credit improvement will be an even greater trial by time. Few positive things in the realm of FICO scoring happen overnight.

You have to bear in mind going into a FICO improvement campaign that your credit score is your financial reputation. And as anyone who has been disgraced for human failings knows, reputations take years to develop but only a brief episode of malfeasance or "what the hell was I thinking?" to trash. (Of course, sometimes bills being late or defaulted on is beyond your control and no reflection on your personal morals, but I'm sure you grasp the point I'm getting at.)

If your credit score is low, it is low because you damaged your financial reputation by (willingly or unwillingly) not paying something you promised to pay (or, in the case of some judgments or tax liens, not being able to pay something someone thought you should pay). And reputations, alas, take far longer to rebuild than to damage or degrade.

But you can rebuild your credit score. How long will it take? This depends in large part on how severe the damage is, and how dedicated you are to the task of rebuilding. If you just filed bankruptcy and you're sitting at a 468 credit score, recovery will probably take several years. If you just stumbled and racked up a few collections and lates, recovery will probably take several months to a couple years.

Success in credit score recovery relies on you taking the right course of action even if you do not immediately reap any rewards for so doing. I see many posts in credit forums where someone is emerging from a bankruptcy or other major credit mishap, they try working on their credit for a few months, their FICO scores hardly budge...and then they give up in frustration. Very human...but recall earlier on I said you have to set emotions aside and consider the cold, hard numbers.

In the immediate aftermath of a blunder, FICO scoring is designed to ignore positive actions you take. I call it the "washout period." For bankruptcies, it's about a year to eighteen months. For collections and charge-offs, about six months. For late payments, about three months. After a wave of charge-offs, you can do everything right for six, even eight months and not see any reward.

However, when the washout period ends--and end it will--what happens to your score depends very much on what you were doing during that dismal time. If you established two or three revolving accounts and kept them in good standing, eight to ten months down the road the FICO computers will all of a sudden emerge from their funk or offended-ness or whatever and say, "Gee, maybe this guy isn't so bad after all. He screwed up, true enough, but he's been working hard to do the right thing. Let's ease up."

In my case, I began with scores just south of 500, coming off of several charge-offs. I discovered credit scoring, researched how it worked (but didn't know as much as I knew now), and concluded I needed to swallow my pride and take the secured card Bank of America had been pushing back at me every time I applied for unsecured credit but got denied. I had no good revolving accounts. So I got that card, paid it on time...and a month later, my FICO score actually went DOWN 4 points.

I just about put my fist through the monitor; I was within an ace of canceling my ScoreWatch subscription and saying "to hell with it." I fragged some barbarians in Rome Total War, calmed down, and decided to just keep letting my little experiment run. Months went by...nothing happened...and I rather freely posted my frustrations on Fair Isaac's credit fora.

Then, after I'd almost forgotten about the whole thing, my score went up 8 points. Then, three weeks later, another 11 points. Then, a month after that, 7 points. A month after that, 9 more points. Then down 3 points. Then up 12. The pattern was unmistakeable. I had passed through the washout period, and was now reaping the rewards for what I'd done right those seven or eight months. I got another three credit cards...there was a temporary ten-point setback for that, and then my scores resumed their climb, toward 600, then past 650. One month I had a 17-point increase.

The moral of the story: the system I set out on this Web site works. But it does require patience. It's not an instant fix. No real solution to a problem ever is.