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Showing posts from 2010

Do You Have Too Much Debt?

Your Debt to Income Ratio is key to your loan approval. Here's how to beat the system. Your personal Debt to Income Ratio (DTI) is an important factor all lenders use to determine your credit worthiness. This ratio is essentially what you earn against what you are paying out each month for scheduled debt. If you have a high debt ratio, then your monthly living expenses will usually start to suffer and most people will start missing payments or let their credit balances creep higher. This is murder to your credit rating as all your creditors will see this trend when they view your statistics. Once your balances rise, your credit score dives, and up go your interest rates! So it pays to understand how this works. Literally. SAVE this Debt Evaluation Calculator link: http://tinyurl.com/msn-debtcalculator Essentially if you are over 30% of your availble credit balance and over 40% of your monthly income going out the door via regularly sc...

Credit Recovery after Short Sale or Foreclosure:

Position Yourself to Purchase a Home Within 2 Years After a Foreclosure Using This Strategy: Generally, buyers who have past credit issues due to a financial crisis may be able to buy a home within three years from the incident. This varies by loan type and lender. Most lenders have their own underwriting guidelines on what they will accept and when. 620-640 FICO is the starting point for government insured loans. So for anyone going down this path, consider the recovery time to get your credit back into lending territory and note the recovery steps at the bottom of this post. Put them on your refrigerator! Given the sheer number of people in financial distress right now, consider that loan guidelines may change in the coming years. For more distressed borrower information, visit our other blog: www.equitytalks.blogspot.com How soon can you buy a home again? If you default on your home loan now, the clock starts ticking when the home i...

What's Your FICO Score Really Worth?

In today's market, personal credit scores are being skewed by a decline in average FICO ® scores. Why should you care? Well, if you are intending to get into debt responsibly in the coming year your FICO score is still the number one criteria your lender will use to determine your likelihood of paying them back. It's also one of the chief pricing factors to getting the best interest rate. That said, things are changing at a rapid pace. The newly minted FICO models are supposedly taking less consideration for small things like parking tickets but the really big defaults for big items like mortgages and car loans will weigh even more heavily as a result.  All defaults have less effect on your score as time goes on . With improved history that is! So it stands to reason that if more homeowners take the 'walkaway' option the impact will be figured into the score models for that particular historical period of consumer behavior. Essentially scoring mod...