Most people know that if they pay their bills late, their credit scores will suffer. However, most people don’t know this: According to Credit.com, a single 90-day late payment is as damaging as a bankruptcy filing, a tax lien, a collection, a judgment, or repossession. It doesn’t matter if you’re late paying a $50 credit card bill or a $2,000 mortgage payment. All that matters is that you were 90 days behind in paying your due balance.
Payment punctuality counts for about 35% of your overall credit score. Paying bills on time is generally the single most important contributor to a good credit score. Being late on any bill, for any length of time, is a possible sign of future non-payment of debt and is always viewed negatively by lenders. Late payments stay on your credit report for 7 years from the date of the initial missed payment.
A 30 or 60 day late payment will damage your credit score only while it is being reported as currently past due. They usually don’t cause lasting damage to your credit score after this period passes unless you make 30 or 60 day late payments on a regular basis.
If you only have a few 30-60 day late payments listed on your credit report, the best thing to do is contact your creditors by phone and ask them to remove it. Tell them a nice little story and ask them nicely to remove it. Follow the conversation with a written request to have the isolated late payments removed from your reports. However, if you consistently make late payments, it will probably take a little more effort.
As mentioned, a 90-120 day late payment is extremely damaging. At around 90-120 days, the creditor will usually write off the account and it will stay on your credit report as a charge off for 7 years.
If you are unable to get the creditor to remove the late payment history from your reports, there are a few other ways to do it. One of the best ways is to dispute them with the credit bureaus.
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Posted: February 14th, 2010 by
| Filed under Credit, Leasing
These days, it’s easy to get a credit card and then spend like crazy on all the things that you enjoy. This can become a problem when you do not pay that credit back. This means that you cannot make the monthly payments
or that you do not pay them back on time. This can result in bad credit and what this means is that you will have a bad credit history which will in turn make it harder for you to make a loan
of any sort on anything. However, this is not a dead end kind of situation. You can actually climb out of that debt by trying out personal loans for bad credit. Here are a couple of the most famous kinds of loans.
Secured Personal Loans
These personal loans for bad credit can be easy to get and they are actually kind of popular as well. First, the one thing that you can be sure of is that you will pay off this loan on a monthly basis with lower payments because of the lower interest rates. Of course, since the payments are so low, you can expect that it will take some time for you to pay off the loan because they offer longer amounts of time to pay it off. This can be good for some people who want to maintain a steady but sure pace in paying back the loans. But for others, it might be too long and they will forget to make payments in the long run. It really depends on the kind of discipline that you set for yourself. The other drawback is that you need to present an asset like a house as a kind of collateral for the loan. This will make it easier for lenders to loan you the amount that you need. If you do not pay it back, they have your car or house to fall back on as payment for the loan. This means you risk losing your assets to the lender.
Unsecured Personal Loans
These, of course, are the complete opposite of secured loans and these can be risky for both the lender and the borrower. It is more risky for the lender because there is no collateral involved here which means they will charge you a higher interest rate and a higher monthly rate. If you do not pay, the lender has no collateral as back up from you. The higher payment is what you will suffer from in the long run.
Posted: February 2nd, 2010 by
| Filed under Banking, Credit, financial planning, Leasing, Loans