Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Getting A Loan Despite Bad Credit Scores

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.

Bad credit lenders are all over the place. They compensate for taking on bad credit lenders by charging them high interest rates. So it might be quite a challenge getting a somewhat reasonable offer from one of them. But no matter what, be prepared to hand over a lot of documentation as a way for them to try and assess what kind of risk you represent.

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.

There are a variety of scores used by different financial institutions. Credit card companies have their variants, and so do insurance companies and car loan lenders, just to name a few examples. What doesn't change, though is this: the higher your score, the better you look. In all cases, the higher your score, the more likely your application will be approved and the better terms you will get.

One thing a lot of people tend to overlook is that every person has not one, but three credit scores, one per credit bureau. It is that way because companies are not typically required to report to all three credit bureaus, so not everyone gets the same information. It's thus recommended that you get your score from all three bureaus to have a complete snapshot of your credit profile.

With so many life-changing credit decisions hanging on people's credit scores, it might sound surprising to point out that a good percentage of credit reports are inaccurate because of errors and/or omissions. That's why you should never take for granted that your file is ok and you should look it over thoroughly to make sure your information is not riddled with mistakes. Anything that's not correct should be reported immediately so as to be corrected. You can check within a month's time to verify that any errors are now gone from your report.

Often times, once people find out that their credit is shot, they pretty much give up on the credit system entirely and don't even bother trying to understand how it works so they can turn things around. The problem with this attitude is that their credit remains bad. But if they had taken the time to educate themselves, they could have made better financial decisions for their future, either by being more savvy when looking for a bad credit loan, or by doing what it takes to improve their credit and be eligible for a standard loan. - 16928

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