Credit fix places

My credit score has taken a hit because of this, all accounts now are taken care of.

My question is, I see all of these credit repair offers on the TV, have any of you used one? Do any of them work or are they all scams??

Thanks

There was mention of consumer credit counseling. Avoid that, also. It tells a banker that you can not manage your money, it is kin to a bankruptcy in the eyes of a lender.

Dave Ramsey was also mentioned. Despite what one may think of him, his advice is dead on! Debt free is the best way to live. You can buy his book, but I would suggest browsing his website, also. Find a radio station, if on in your area, and listen to him a few weeks. About 10 years ago my wife came up with this crazy idea of living debt free (long before I had heard of Dave.) I thought she was nuts, but went along anyway...about 5 years ago we paid off every bill except the mortgage (and it is small). We will build a new home this year and maintain a very managable mortgage. Point is, it takes time and effort, but everyone can live debt free, or nearly so, it just takes a desire to get there. And once you are debt free, you don't need to worry about your credit score!

Another thing that will help is a cheap puter money management program like Quicken Basic or MsMoney.

If you track your daily spending habbits, you will soon find out just how much your spending on those small items that eat your cash alive. It's very simple to increase your net income by 10% just by using daily expense tracking.

Only time will heal that credit score with a good payment history.

T_Bone

You can get a free report from each of the three reporting agencies (TransUnion, Experian and Equifax) once a year. You can order all three at once, but you might want to stagger them out over the year. They will try to sell you extras, such as your FICO score. In your current state, you probably don't need to waste money on the extras, you just need to make sure that the information in your report is accurate.

If you find anything inaccurate in your report, you can dispute it and (hopefully) get it corrected. For free.

• Annual Credit Report

My brother in law is a credit analyst and we have had some discussions that really opened my eyes. I always thought that have credit cards with high credit limits was bad. He actually said that if they see you have multiple credit cards with high limits that you use responsibly (i.e. pay off every month), that will really help your credit. So in short, don't cut up the cards if you can use them responsibly.

So what did you do? There's a certain amount of satisfaction in pointing out to a deadbeat what's wrong with his life, but not $350 a month worth. A long time ago I had to have some non-paying renters evicted from my first rental house, and more recently I got a good deal of experience with evictions at an apartment complex I worked at. Dead loss, as far as I can tell. Our legal system, particularly the civil law side, isn't set up to protect those who follow the rules from those who don't. This was hammered home for me when I learned that the quasi-legal definition of "judgement proof" is a person who has nothing to lose, nothing to give up, nothing that can be taken to settle claims against him or her. If you do have something to lose, however, you're really a prisoner to the system (See T_Bone's posting and the responses concerning property taxation abuses below for one example.) You have to play by the rules and take your lumps. You'll lose but you won't lose everything. Go outside the rules a little bit though (throw a deadbeat renter's goods out into the yard, injure an unarmed burglar in your house, grab a minor who's trying to flee after being caught vandalizing your property) and you're likely to lose everything.

Why is it that we productive citizens in a country which is a democracy feel so much like the helpless subjects of a lunatic feudal system? I know that it's not as bad as it could be, but is that actually a high enough standard? How much comfort, much less pride, should we take in the fact that our country's motto today could be, "America---not the worst country ever"? Didn't we used to aspire to a higher standard than that?

All the best, Stan

So...their deal was, send us your monthly payments you were paying to your debtors. We keep your money in our account.....until you are past 90 days due on ALL your debt payments, then they try and get the companies you owe money to to settle for half the outstanding debt or something like that....they tell you not to talk to the credit card companies or auto loan companies if they call you, just refer them to this 'get out of debt company' - of course they want you to do that, otherwise you find out they are HOLDING YOUR MONEY, and not paying YOUR PAYMENTS, and RUINING YOUR CREDIT while they make a profit.

It's a real quick way to ruin your credit rating. She never did get her money back from those folks and ended up having a minor hiccup on her credit report before we figured out what they were doing. We had to make up all the back payments real quick to get things back on track.

Non profit credit COUNSELING services are valuable, same as watching closely what you are spending your money on.