Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Handle Your Bad Credit To Get Your Loan Approved

By Ray W Garvin

Having a poor credit record doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to have to be a renter for the rest of your life. On the other hand, what it does mean is that you're going to have to educate yourself about credit scores and their impact on mortgage loan rates.

You'll find that having bad credit does not mean you won't find lenders willing to give you a loan. Instead it means that the loans you'll find will be at interest rates you probably don't want to have to pay. You'll also be asked for much more documentation to support your application.

Fair Isaac & Company (better known as FICO) is the leading company when it comes to calculating and assigning credit scores. Their score (the FICO score) is the one most often used by lenders. Knowing your FICO score gives you a pretty good idea of how prospective lenders will view your credit application and whether or not it has a good chance of being approved.

All financial institutions do not use exactly the same version of the FICO score. Specific examples of this are the credit card, insurance, and auto loan industries which all have their own little variation of the credit score that specifically meets their needs. Yet they all share the characteristic that says that the higher your score, the better a deal you'll be eligible for.

You might be surprised to learn that you have more than one credit score. That's right! You have three of them, as each credit bureau has their own. While common sense might dictate that they'd all be identical, it's absolutely not the case, because the companies that report our credit activity aren't required to do so to all the bureaus. In order to get your complete credit profile (and not 1/3 of it), you should get your score from all three bureaus.

It's common knowledge that a sizable percentage of credit reports contain errors. When you receive yours, most experts recommend that you go through it with a fine-toothed comb in order to make sure that there are no mistakes there that make your file look worse than it really is. Any mistake you find should be signaled to the corresponding credit bureau for correction. Remember to followup (usually within a month's time) to make sure that appropriate action has been taken and that your information is now accurate.

A poor credit record often results in people telling themselves that now that their credit is in the dumpster, all hope is lost. So they see no benefit in trying to understand how the credit scoring system works. It can pay great dividends to find out more about it when dealing with, for example, sub prime mortgage lenders. You will find yourself able to negotiate better deals with them or you might just try to improve your credit so you can get better loan terms altogether. When it comes to financial matters, ignorance is definitely not bliss. - 16752

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