If you have made some bad debt management mistakes in the past or have made mistakes on a debt consolidation loan, or whatever it might be, you may not realize how much those debt management mistakes can affect your future. However, if you go and try and find a reasonable loan for a house or a home, you will discover right away just how much problems this can cause. So it is important that you try and repair these mistakes from the past.
The first thing you need to figure out is what is the extent of the past mistakes and you can do this by requesting a free copy of your credit report. It is your right to receive one free credit report on a yearly basis and one place you can get them from is from AnnualCreditReport.com. You'll be able to get a report from all three major credit bureaus simply by going online. Make sure that you look over each report carefully and see which areas of your history needs to be improved upon.
If you see that there are old medical bills still not paid or collection accounts, then you need to take care of these right away. If you don't pay things like medical bills or cell phone or even utilities, these things are going to leave negative marks against you on your credit report. You should call up these old creditors and tell them you would like to be able to pay the balance off. Then talk to the manager to see if they can then update your credit report for you after you have paid off the balance.
If you notice that you have some outstanding judgments against you, you will need to take care of these as well. Any kind of credit judgment is going to put a blemish on your credit score too. If you can't pay it off all at once you need to see if you can't arrange to make some sort of monthly payment until you have the judgment paid off. Once this is paid off you should ask the creditor to make sure to send in a letter to the courts to let them know that you have satisfied the judgment against you.
Once you have done these things and have tried to clean up your credit history as best you can it is important that you make sure to pay all of your credit cards and other bills continually on time. The better you take care of your current bills the better it will be on your credit report. In order to make sure the bills get paid on time either use online bill paying or send in your payment at least a week prior to the due date on the bill. This way you know the payment is going to get there on time.
If you happen to have a bankruptcy on file it's a good idea to try and fix your credit by applying for a secured credit card and then make all of your payments on time. You should get this kind of a card from a bank or your credit union. By getting one of these you will be able to eventually patch up the blemishes that the bankruptcy has put on your credit history.
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