Avoid Unnecessary Fees And Penalties

It pays (literally!) to know all the terms and conditions of your credit card agreement. Find out all the ways it’s possible to incur additional fees and penalties…and then take steps to avoid them.

Know your credit limit and stick to it. Know the minimum monthly payment and when it has to be paid by. To make sure, you could set up an automatic payment from your bank to your credit card account every month. Set a monthly sum that’s bigger than the minimum amount required. That will prevent any penalties for late payments. You can then pay extra towards your account as and when you have extra cash available.

As far as the annual fee is concerned, this is just blatant profiteering by lenders. If your can has an annual fee write to your lender asking for it to be waived. If they don’t agree, move your debt to a card provider that doesn’t operate an annual fee.

Lenders make billions every year from basic interest payments alone, don’t give them the jam on top as well.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 and is filed under Debt Consolidation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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How Credit Scores Affect Mortgage Applications

With a good credit score an applicant will receive prompt response from many lenders, all of them offering low interest rates and low down payment options. The loan amount offered also may be high. On the contrary a low credit score would result in a lot of rejection from various mortgage financers. Because creditors wouldn’t come forward easily to give credit to individuals that have a history of difficulty in repaying existing loans. After all, creditors take risk when they finance mortgages against the credit history of a debtor. Naturally, they will wish to remain on the safe side and pick up less risky ones that have good credit histories. A good credit score means less chance of missing on payments and therefore less risky.

But there are some real risk takers that will come forward to finance mortgages for individuals with bad credit scores. They would charge high down payments and always high interest rates though. They may also fix additional charges for every little paper work and may charge high closing rates. The loan amount offered will also be considerably less. The individual with poor credit scores will not have much choice but to accept the terms and conditions as there are no other alternatives. This is a tight situation and to avoid this you must have a good credit score.

People with bad credit may fall in to the trap of ’secured loans’. Secured loans are the ones where the loan applicant offers an asset as collateral security. The lender becomes secure about the repayment of the loan and not the borrower. Securing a loan with bad credit score becomes easy only when the applicant is willing to offer some asset as collateral security. This again is a very dangerous situation where an individual runs the risk of losing his entire collateral asset in case of failing to pay the loan installments in time. An individual should always avoid such type of a loan.

Resort properties normally require large amounts of finance which a person with bad credit may find it difficult to obtain. So it is always advisable to keep your credit score high. Incase the credit score becomes low due to unavoidable financial reasons it can be improved upon. There is no need to lose hope simply because a person has a low credit score. If the property that he intends to buy has good equity he should go out and try to obtain finances for it. There are many sub prime lenders willing to offer their services.

For a review of your credit report as it relates to a mortgage loan and a consultation on the best loans available to you, give us a confidential, no obligation and no cost call.