Sorry, Blacsight, but having bad credit is an awful lot like getting fat.
You eat and you eat and you over indulge yourself until you weight 300 pounds. You can’t just wake up one mornig and decide it’s all going to go away immediately because you are tired of being fat. There is no magic wand to wave that will return you to 140 pounds overnight. If you want the weight off, you have to work hard at it and it takes time.
It’s the same with credit. You spend and you spend and you don’t pay your bills. Well, you can’t wake up one morning and decide you don’t want bad credit any more and just wave a magic wand and it’s gone.
If you want to repair bad credit, you have to work at it and it takes time.
You’d be better off to take that $2,000 and pay off some of your bills.
Credit repair is really very temproary, if it works at all. The credit bureaus have closed the loop hole where you could ride on someone else’s good credit-- and that cost a heck of a lot more than $2,000 when it was available.
By the way, if you apply for a miortgage with a mortgage broker who is a little weak in the ethic department, they will do the credit repair thing for you for free, to try to get the loan through before you get caught. No need to pay $2,000 for it.
Tatertot is exactly right (as usual). Your credit score is a measure of your financial trustworthiness. You’ll have a VERY hard time with real estate investing if you can’t show that you are trustworthy in a financial sense.
As Keith likes to say, there are 168 hours in a week. That is plenty of time to work 2 full time jobs and still have over half the week left over for sleep. If you are serious about becoming an investor, you need to work hard and pay your bills (past and present). It’s that simple.
I went to Tracey Ballard’s website. It looks like a dating site as opposed to a credit repair site. First off she says she has one of the “hottest consumer credit consultation firms around”. If anything is hot then it is a fad. I would find a firm that has been consistent. Another thing is that she says that she has the “ability to identify with representatives of many different lifestyles”. What the heck does that mean? Are these representatives her employees or her customers?
Credit repair is not brain surgery and I guess she can be just as good as anybody else. I would use someone in my home town that has been doing it for a while. I would ask my mortgage broker who he recommends.
Do not waste your money with her, if you want to repair your credit, go to creditboards.com and search the forum there for your particular problems. I would suggest truecredit.com for checking your credit report periodically for changes. I had bad credit 2 years ago from college. My new score is around 750. I got everything off from back then. For me girls and drinking came above paying bills in a timely matter, I kept the memories but lost the dings on my report. Godbless america!!
I am in a debt situation also ($2000 in debt) and I have contacted several debt agencies that collect a fee to lower my payments into one payment. They said that payment was gonna be $150 a month. Well, I called the two debtor’s myself, and I explained my issue to them, and both lowered the monthly payments to $50 and $34 a month instead of $105 and $80 a month, so I kind of did that the credit repairers did, on my own with no fee. Try it for yourself, and see what happens!
Just an FYI, wherever a loophole closes another one opens - as long as your credit is clean (no lates or delinquencies), you can still do something that has the same affect. My scores jumped 80 points in 60 days - but I had no negative marks to start with. So it is still available. If anybody wants more info you can PM me.
One thing that I have found is that a lot of people just have a lot of accounts. They just get lost trying to make all those payments and forget one or two. All bills can be paid on the internet. Sign up for automatic payment and they will never be late. That takes care of paying your bills.
blacsight, these guys are not just jerks that judge you based on a credit score. What they have to do is to figure out if they lend you millions or dollars to buy dozens of houses on which you have dozens of mortgages are you organized enough to pay them every month. That is why you need to have some kind of system to make sure your bills always get paid on time every time. Whether you eat or not, your bills get paid. That is why I don’t co-sign for anybody. My credit is a tool of my trade. It is not a play thing. I don’t loan my tools to anyone. You need to look at your credit the same way. You don’t want your credit fixed you want a system for paying your bills.