Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Handle Your Bad Credit To Get Your Loan Approved

By Ray W Garvin

If your dream is to own your own home, but you unfortunately have bad credit, there's still hope out there for you. Although you'll have more trouble securing a loan than someone with good credit, with a little education on credit scores and how they affect mortgage rates, you'll be better armed to point your research in the right direction.

You're going to have to be ready to get out there and sift through numerous bad credit lenders to find one that will offer you a reasonable deal. You're also going to have to prepare yourself to hand any prospective lender some serious documentation to sway them in your favor.

It's surprising to see how many people try getting a loan without knowing what their credit score is. In the case of mortgage loan, the score most widely used by lenders is the FICO score, named after Fair Isaac & Company, which is the company that calculates the score. Your credit score summarizes your credit history in one number and that number guides lenders in their loan approval decisions.

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.

When people have bad credit, they often don't bother knowing how the credit system works, because they think that they're not going to need that information. As it turns out, getting to know the basics of the credit scoring system can prove beneficial. You'll either know what to expect from bad credit finance companies, or you'll decide to take the time to clean up your credit and apply for a loan when your credit profile looks better. In both cases, you come out ahead because an informed customer is always better off than an uninformed one. - 16003

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