chatting credit, it's time to take it serious! Good homes are for sale!

Good morning blog aholics, welcome to the day after St Patrick's day! I hope all my Irish friends were safe, and all my Irish friends for the day were safe as well! Today, I need to try and get through to you how serious this credit stuff is and why you need to pay attention to your credit. It's spring time and the house itch is among us, with all the foreclosures, down market, it's a good time to buy. You want to buy and man, I sure wish I could?!?! Well you can and you should, now is a great time to get that credit checked and get going on it.

Over the past couple of months I can't tell you how many times I've helped people who are just short of the credit score that was needed. I'm talking just a few points, you would think a few points is no big deal but here is why it is. Consider this little situation, you find a house you want to buy, you find your agent and your mortgage guy. You figure you have what it takes because you pulled your credit online. Then your mortgage guy pulls your credit and you're short on points. You didn't think that was possible and you didn't look at your report other than the numbers. In most cases that I've been given and looked at, there seems to be an error reporting. More than numbers my friends, more than numbers and why again? When you pull online you are pulling Vantage scores from the bureaus not FICO scores which is what most mortgage and banking professionals use. Then when you look deeper into your credit, either from speaking to me or your mortgage guy you find some errors or what you think are errors. Bottom line, if it's one point or a lot of points your not going to get pre-qualified and an underwriter won't be making an exception either. That collection you didn't know about, late payment or maybe you had a Bankruptcy and things are reporting correctly. It could be a number of things, that's why you need to look deeper than numbers and make sure the information is correct. More importantly when you want to try and fix something on your credit, on your own or with me it can take time. Minimum time frame is 45 days, that's if your wrote to the bureaus the correct way. If not, it could take longer and things could be delayed. Take a deep breath, things can be fixed you need to get on it and do it the right way. However, doing it the right way is not that easy and one I'm not going to disclose to you now. As always, if you need help or have questions I'm always around.

john@redphoenixco.com