By Mark Alison
If you’re like most people, you would erase bad credit scores if you could. Erasing bad credit isn’t impossible, and it opens up opportunities that would be otherwise unavailable to you.
Your car is having problems again and you are not sure what it is going to take to fix it. Is it worth putting several hundred dollars into it to get it through another six months or should you start looking for a new one. You see all those ads about everyone being approved and buying a car with no money down and $99 a month payments. How can it be and would you be qualified if you tried? The guy in the ads on television is right when he sings about free credit reports except do not go to the site he sings about. That site wants to sell you credit monitoring service for $15 a month for you to get you single credit report. What you really need are the three individual reports from each of the three national reporting agencies. The federal government passed a law in 2005 mandating that every person is able to get a single report from Experian, TransUnion and Equifax at no charge once each year.
All three agencies have their own individual websites and you should also book mark myFICO.com as another site to use in fixing low credit scores. You have to have all three credit scores to be able to tell where to spend the most effort in fixing low credit scores. The single most important thing you can do to go about fixing low credit scores is to pay all of your bills on time. Keeping your bills current is thirty five percent of your total credit score.
Not fixing low credit scores can put you in a lending category that is not being served in many cases right now. If you have emergency cash needs you will probably need to resort to borrowing from family, friends or even pay day loan sources. A simple Pay Day loan can get you through, but you will need to repay it within the term you set out, usually by your next paycheck. Keep in mind that if you do not pay it in full that the interest continues to accrue on the whole amount until it is paid back. For example, if you borrow $500 the amount you will have to repay might be $600 and if you only pay $250 back on the first due date you will still owe $100 on the next repayment date plus your remaining $250 balance.
Shop around for pay day loans as the amount needed to get one varies widely. There is a company called Check Into Cash that offers pay day loans up to $450 that have less than 200% annual rates. Your actual interest on a 14 day loan would be $19.99 but most online sites charge much more due to a higher risk of fraud. Check Into Cash only offers those rates to people who actually come into their offices. They also offer check cashing services for those who do not want to go through the check hold procedures at many normal banks.