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’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.
Because the FICO score (developed by Fair Isaac & Company) is the one that pretty much all lenders use, before you go out there and try getting your home loan, it’s good to know what yours is. Once you do, you’ll have a good feel for what to expect from the people you’ll be submitting your loan application to and what your chances of approval are.
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.
In case you didn’t know it or it slipped out of your mind, you have three credit scores, not one. Because all three credit bureaus work independently, and because there’s no legislation requiring that credit information be reported to all three bureaus, your credit file will vary from one to the other. The only way to get as accurate a snapshot of your credit profile as possible is to order your credit score from each one of them.
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.
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.