Posts Tagged credit counseling

Do you Understand Your Credit Score?

How Much Will You Pay For a Low Beacon or Fico Score?

Do You Have Credit Cards?

If you have a low Fico or Beacon score you will be in the Jilted category, getting a good rate on a credit card is simply out of the question.  If you do get a credit card, you may be hit with high interest rates, upfront set-up fees, reoccurring monthly fees and cash deposits.

Auto Loans

Your payments on an automobile will go through the roof with bad credit.  Here are examples.
$20,000 auto loan over 5 years

Category Interest Rate Payment Total Cost After 5 Years
Prime 7% $405 $24,300
Subprime 14% $477 $28,620
Hardy Money (Jilted) 21% $557 $33,420

Home Loans

$100,000 loan for the home over 30 years

Category Interest Rate Payment Total Cost After 30 Years
Prime 6.50% $632 $228,625
Alternative A 7.50% $699 $251,715
Subprime 10% $877 $315,925
Hard Money (Jilted) 14% $1,184 $426,553

Having bad credit can cost you thousands of dollars.

 

Do you need to raise your credit score?

 

What Factors Affect Your Credit FICO Score?

There are five things used in calculating your total FICO score.

History of payments is 35% of your score
Payment history is determined by if you pay your accounts on time.  
Payment history includes any loan that you have had to make monthly payments on.  For example, auto loans, home loans, credit cards, retail stores and other lenders. 
If you are late on an account it can eventually turn into a public account or collection account.  These include, but are not limited to collections, liens, judgments, lawsuits,bankruptcies and wage attachments.  These are very serious accounts and hurt your credit score dramatically.
Security- How late is the payment?  Have you been 30, 60, 90 or 120 days late? Is it still outstanding?  Paying on time will increase your Beacon or Fico Score greatly.
Recent history- How long ago where you delinquent?  Are you still delinquent?  Recent late payments can hurt your score by 100 points.
Prevalence- How many obligations do you have?  What percentages of your accounts are late now?

How Much Debt You Have is 30% of Your Score

Can you make your payments and pay your home bills on time and still have money to spend on every day activities? 
What type of account is it?  Credit accounts are figured differently depending on the type. Credit cards are different than mortgages in factoring your FICO score or determining if you apply for a loan.
It is important to look at how much you owe total.  A lot of accounts with small balances may lower credit score because you could run up those balances at anytime. If you have not used a credit card in longtime, you should use it to make a small purchase. That way the credit card company won’t close the account. Paying down your debt below thirty percent will help keep your credit FICO score high.  Try to keep the amount of credit cards you keep down to a minimum.  Three or four open credit cards are a good amount to have.
If you have high balances on your credit cards and are close to your limit, it is affecting your score, even if you have made your payments on time.  Lenders do not want to see high balances because it shows that you may not have the money to pay anymore than the minimum payment.

Amount of Time Credit Has Been In Use is 15% of your score

The longer you have credit history, the higher the score as long as the credit you have has been in great standings.  This means that older people that have always had good credit will probably have higher FICO scores than someone who is younger with good credit, but young people can still have a great credit score.
It is very important to look at how long have you had an account and the length of time it has been in the credit report.  The average age of your accounts are taken into factored when calculating your score.  You must also use the accounts that you have.  If it has been long time since you have used an account, it is possbile that it may be to old to score.  Using the accounts you have will help your score.

Inquires, they account for 10% of your credit score

It is easy to obtain credit these days through the internet, via mail, and many other ways.  Every time you let someone run your credit and you get an inquiry, and it can hurt your credit score.  Mortgage and auto loans are treated differently for example auto loans made within 14 days are counted as one There are no good inquiries.  Every time you fill out a credit application, you get one or more inquiries.  Too many inquiries look bad.  Even though there are no good inquiries, there are neutral ones that don’t hurt your score.Pre-approval inquiries are when a potential lender has looked at your credit to determine whether they want to offer you a credit.  These are not factored in to your score, but once you fill out an application with the lender, it will show up to be a bad inquiry that does hurt your score.

Periodic Review inquiries are when lenders periodically review your credit to see if there are any major changes.  If they see a major change in your score they may close your account.  These are also not supposed to be factored into your FICO score. Inquiries can show a banker how often you are trying to open up new accounts and how recent those attempts were.
Primary consideration is given to the following:

  • Number of inquiries in last six months
  • Number of accounts opened in the last year
  • Number of months since most recent inquiry

How inquiries are calculated is somewhat complex and they should be avoided if possible. 

Types of Credit Experience is 10% of your score

It’s awesome to have a different kinds of accounts.  Having payment accounts, retail accounts, credit cards and a home loan is good.  Since this is only worth ten percent of your score, it is not a big factor but can help.  Do not go out a try to open different kinds of accounts because a bad mix may hurt you and lower your score.

Do you have questions about raising your Credit Score?


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Credit Counseling And How They Will Guide You In Your Much Needed Repair

Budgeting is a gift, like many things in life, and takes practice. Some people have a natural way for managing their income and staying in good standing with their debtors. Most people have a portion of debt, whether it’s a credit card bill, a mortgage, or a car loan. Managing your debts properly will result in a good credit rating, and allow you to get credit in the future. Making late payments on your loans – or worse, letting them go into default – will leave you saddled with a poor credit rating, robbing you of many opportunities to obtain future credit. To start the process of credit repair, you must take your time and build your credit rating up again. One way to do this involves seeking the assistance of a credit counselor.

Credit counseling is usually performed by non-profit agencies, and should not be confused with credit repair companies for-profit. Credit repair companies that operate for-profit should definitely be avoided. These types of companies, especially the online variety, have a reputation for lying their customers. Even if the for-profit credit service you end up with doesn’t scam you, you’ll likely end up paying them to do something that you could have done yourself. They will direct you to obtain a copy of your credit report, dispute everything on the negative listings on it, and maybe even suggest that you attempt something illegal to repair your credit: like applying for a mortgage using a different address.

Getting help from a credit counselor is one of the most precise ways to repair your credit. A non-profit credit counseling service will provide just a direction for advice. They won’t try to tell you that rebuilding your credit rating is a fast process. Credit counselors will assist you to make the long-term plans you need to effectively repair your credit.

A good credit counseling organization will offer you advice, workshops, and educational materials. One of the many things you will learn, is to make and stick to a budget, which will be an immeasurable asset to your financial standing in the long run and crucial to the fixing your credit rating. A good credit counselor will also provide you with personal help, so you can take a look at what you’ve done wrong in the past and see what is needed to be done to make positive credit-related decisions in the future.

Unfortunately, for-profit credit repair companies propose suspiciously quick, one-size-fits-all solutions. If a company claims that they can fix your credit quickly without even knowing anything about your individual situation, they are lying through their teeth. A credit counselor can provide the individual attention that credit repair companies typically avoid.

The number one reason to engage in credit repair with a credit counselor, is the long-term solutions that will give you what your looking for. You will learn how to balance your budget correctly, and make crucial changes in your spending habits. This method is far preferable to paying a fly-by-night credit repair company to provide you with a “quick solution” that has no practical, educational, or financial value to you.

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You Can Genuinely Gain from Using A Certified Credit Counseling Bureau

Even though right now credit card debt is the number one type of debt that Americans have it continues to swell to a greater extent each ensuing year. As times get tougher and cash get short, more and more people are willing to use credit cards for things that they wouldn’t normally use them for, like gas and groceries. Whenever you do this, you are paying interest on things that you need for your day-to-day living, which makes you end up paying more for these items than you would if you could just manage to use cash and save your credit cards for emergency purchases. When anything is charged on one of your credit cards it is subject to interest rates and often paid off at the minimum payment over a period of years. The end result of this could be years of payments towards a simple tank of gas or a weeks worth of food.

What credit counseling is, is a way of managing your debt that allows you to be counseled by a trained and many times certified specialist in debt management. This debt counselor will have a plethora of information surrounding all areas of managing your debt including debt consolidation, and debt negotiation, and they will be able to look at your current state of credit card debt and give you advice on which path you should take to clear up your card debt and give you a financially debt free future.

Before you journey out to find a credit counselor, take the time to put together a list of all your credit card accounts with the following information included for each: creditor, creditor contact information, current balance, monthly payments and interest rate. This is the basic information about your account and can help with the process of planning to get rid of that debt. In this article, I am going to cover two of the main forms of credit counseling and some of the different ideas that surround them.These include debt consolidation and debt negotiation.

The form of debt management that is known as debt consolidation, is a way of merging all of your debts into one monthly payment with the low interest rate through the acquiring of a loan that is used to pay off all of the other debt. This can often give you relief from being harassed by creditors, and will effectively lower the amount of money you have to pay out each month as well as the interest rate. A debt consolidation loan is like any other loan and that you have to apply for it and whether you can get it secured or unsecured will depend on the borrowing power that you have.

Debt negotiation is a form of debt management that allows you or a representative for you to contact your creditors and negotiate with them to lower your monthly payments, interest rates or come to a settlement agreement to pay off the loan or account balance at a lower amount. Truly for many people who are in debt this process can be intimidating, but when you have the help of a credit counselor in most instances this can be an effective way to get rid of your debt.

Credit counselors do more than just offer debt elimination services, they also work at helping you manage your finances better, like putting together a smart pay off plan, a plan for the better, and that they try to help you work on a budget that you can live by and stick to. If you’re thinking about taking a move towards a debt counselor, understand that they will provide you with the tools to not only get out of debt now, but they will also provide you with the know-how to keep yourself out of this same situation in the coming years. You might be in debt now, but it doesn’t have to be as bad as you think it is. If you get the right credit counselor and service behind you, it can be a very supportive process that can be very effective in helping you.

Read about non profit credit consolidation

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