When a lender considers approving your mortgage application, it goes something like this: First, what is your credit score? What is your credit history? How much money do you make? How much debt do you have? How much money do you have for a down payment?
Large down payments can help you overcome negative information on your credit history or a less than desired credit score. For the duration of your mortgage, however, you will pay higher fees and interest.
Bottom line is that you have a low credit score. If you want to purchase your own home, you still need a good credit score.
In order to qualify for the lowest interest rates, you need a minimum credit score of 758, according to CNN.com
Now, more than ever, it is important to have a good credit score to qualify for the best rates. The credit crisis has forced the mortgage companies to raise the minimum credit score, within the last 12-18 months.
Improving Your Credit Score to Get a Mortgage
Knowing how to improve your credit score can be confusing. But, if you just concentrate on removing bad credit information, your score will improve.
The “experts” claim that you cannot remove derogatory information from your report. They want you to believe that there is no way to raise a low score without waiting for the bad credit to automatically disappear ” often taking 7-10 years.
You can take matters into your own hands by obtaining your credit report to see what’s on it. Quite frequently, there are mistakes or errors that you can challenge now, and not wait 7-10 years for it to disappear.
Write a dispute letter addressed to the credit bureau or bureaus to dispute the errors. This will save you the frustration of working with the original creditor to fix the error.
More often than not, a well-worded credit dispute letter will resolve the error. In some instances, errors and sloppy work, hinder the investigation process.
This is because some credit bureaus don’t want to spend the time or resources to investigate the dispute. It is simply more cost effective to ignore or delay your dispute.
They want you to just live with the cost of having bad credit, and hope that you will give up on your dispute. This frustration causes some people to hire credit repair services to take over the dispute process.
How Long Will it Take to Raise a Low Credit Score
A frequent concern is how long will it take to improve a low credit score. Although every persons situation is unique, if you are looking for a fairly drastic improvement, then you should expect anywhere between 6 to 12 months before you report is clean.
This is nothing compared to waiting seven to ten years for the negative information to disappear from your credit report. It will be well worth the 6 to 12 month wait needed to raise your credit score, so you can purchase a home.