David does a quick recap of the highlights of his interview with credit repair specialist Chris LaHage from Speedycreditrepair.com. No matter where you are in the home buying process, your credit score is a major factor in helping you land that dream house. The difference of a few points could mean the difference of hundreds of dollars a month and thousands of dollars a year. Bad credit? That’s okay. Prepare yourself for tips to help you climb your way back up and get in the best position to stop paying that high rent and starting owning your piece of the pie.
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Quick Credit Tips For First Time Home Buyers
Bonus Credit Tips To Help You Prepare To Buy Your First House
We all like free stuff. You see the commercials all the time for credit cards that are going to offer you free miles, free bonus points and cash back. What’s the catch? There’s got to be a catch. Be careful because that catch might be keeping you from being a homeowner which means a long time of high rising rents. If you’re here for the first time, this is an education informational show for you. We’re going to try to help you learn how to turn your largest monthly bill, that nasty old rent check into your largest automatic wealth builder and you might be able to do it a lot sooner than you think. That’s why we’re here. We want to help you understand and learn how quickly you might be able to turn from a renter into a homeowner. This show is dedicated to help educate people well before the rest of the industry, whether it be real estate or lenders or anyone else is reaching out there and trying to talk to you.
We want to save you tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think about what I did in my past and when I was in my twenties how much rent I spent because nobody got a show like this. Here I am helping you because we believe that you can do this. Starting off, we’re going to ring the bell. We’ve got 77, 78 and 79. We’re up to 79 first time buyers here in Southern California. Don’t fret if you’re anywhere else in the country. This information can help you anywhere in North America. We’re proud to give it out to you. In the end, I’ll give you some testimonials and let you know about some other great new friends who’ve been using this information and are on their way buying a home, getting ready to run out and kick their landlord.
What we’re going to talk to you is about a podcast. This one is coming at you rather quickly after the last one because we had a great interview and we had lousy sound. Due to some technical difficulties, I’m going to give you the highlights. Don’t let a bad credit score be your deterrent. We talked to Chris Lahage from SpeedyCreditRepair.com. They’re good in all 50 states. You can check out Chris Lahage there. One of the big things he said was, “Don’t let a bad score scare you. There’s nowhere to go but up.” Everything in credit takes time. The longer the wait, it’s that bury your head in the sand thing. If you don’t feel like you have the income now to buy a house, but you are thinking about it, then start doing all the things you need to do. One of them is taking a look at your credit because it will take some time. You can get some advice, some direction and some minor modifications. They will give you a free credit review so you can check them out.
Here are some of the tips that Chris said. The first thing that people say a lot of times is the consumers will come to the credit repair places and say, “What we did is we maxed our cards out, and then we paid them off so that they knew that we were good and that they knew that we were responsible. They would put our score up.” Chris says, “Who are they?” There is no they out there. It’s an algorithm and maxing it and paying it off. If it hits at the wrong time, then it can go bad and plummet your scores. That’s the catch with all of those people. There are a lot of people that have great credit, but what they do then is use their credit to get the miles and the points.
They think they get all these free trips, but what happens is if you maxed your card out, there are three different credit bureaus. One of them might decide to do the report on the first, one might do it on the twelfth or one might do it on the 23rd. If you’re maxed out at that time, your available credit is a gigantic part of your score. If a couple of them hit it when you’ve got a $10,000 credit card, for these people who have had great credit and they’re trying to get super credit now or they’re trying to get all their miles and their bonus points, what happens if you have a $10,000 credit card and you get hit when you’re at $9,999? Now you’ve got 99% usage and 1% availability and that’s no good.
What Chris had recommended was setting it up and paying it off as often as you can. If you want to be a point monster and you want to go after all that stuff, more power to you. I can’t stop you, but you are reading this blog so that means you must have an open mind. What you can do then is we live in an age where you’ve got everything right in your hand. At the moment that you end up trying to get all those points, a day or two later, pull out your phone, open the app and pay it off. You get your points and your score doesn’t go down.
[bctt tweet=”We live in an age where you’ve got everything right in your hand.” username=””]
Here’s another tip that Chris told me. If you’re new to credit and you’ve got your debit card and you think those little magic logos are giving you credit on a debit card, even if it says MasterCard or Visa, that is not building your credit. That’s not what we call a revolving credit. That is just a piece of plastic that works like a checkbook. A checkbook is a rectangular piece of paper that you used to use to write checks, and sometimes people do it at the grocery store and I want to punch them. We talked about maxing out the points. Remember that if you are maxing anything out, your available credit will show not as high as you’d like.
A lot of people would say that you want to keep your available credit at 70%. Some people are saying 80%. If you’ve got $1,000 credit card, you want to keep it. Some people say below 300 and some people are saying below 200 that 20% threshold to be safe. Another tip that he gave us never became an authorized user on a stranger’s card. I know we’ve talked about authorized users in the past. We’ve got episode number three, where we went way deep into some of the credit stuff for mom and dad, aunt and uncle or someone like that. That’s awesome.
There are companies that are selling other authorized users to people out there to help bolster your credit. That would be what we call in the business a shyster. Run from that. Never do that with a stranger. This is going to take you some time. If you’ve got lousy credit, that’s cool. You’re still here, you’re still reading. You still want to learn. You’ve got nowhere to go but up. Nobody can speed up this process. There are definitely things that you are going to need the involvement depending on where you’re at with a credit repair specialist. They can do things faster than you could. You can’t walk in and give him $10,000 and have your score go up 200 points overnight. That means to get started right now.
If you’re looking to buy a home in the next one, two, three, five years, the first thing you want to do is get started on your credit. The faster that you get things going, the more time they’ll have to repair things. As you get very close, if you’ve done the repairs and we need one tweak, there is this cool thing called a rapid rescore. The last time we did it with a lender was about $150. That means if you’ve resolved this issue, the credit bureaus are eventually going to be moving your score up, but that process can take 30, 60 to 90 days. If you have the correct documentation and you and your lender or your credit repair specialist can send that stuff in, you can get a rapid rescore if you’re trying to do something like a car loan. Usually, most people use that for a mortgage. We see that a lot.
The last and most exciting thing that we talked about was that you could get your rental payments recorded to the credit bureaus. There is and they will accept. There is a way to get them as long as you have the correct documentation and you can show that to them, they will use that to help build your credit score. For a nominal fee, it’s about $100. Chris said you could do as far as two years back retroactive. You need to talk to your credit specialist on this. They can get you starting from now and get all your future rents and even go back two years. If you’re saying, “David, there’s no way I or we can do this,” take a look at that because you’ve all got options out there. This show has been going great. We’ve had some fantastic results for people all over the country. We’re giving this information away for free because the real estate industry is not talking to you until they think you’re ready to buy.
If you have any specific questions, go ahead, send them in. All you’ve got to do is put something in the comments or you can go to the website, that’s DavidSidoni.com. Send me an email or send me a text and call me now. I was driving home from an appointment and I got a phone call from Harrington who is in Los Angeles and he needed some help. He’s looking to buy something up in Ventura so I decided I’ll give him a hand. If I’m here and I’m available, this is my way of giving back and I’m excited. I love to help you out. We know that my team is able to help people here in Southern California. We also are able to give you some insight and information on some of the great realtors out there in the country. You can always go back and check out our How to Interview a Realtor. Take that information, run with it and go get a realtor because you deserve it.
[bctt tweet=”The real estate industry is not going to talk to you until they think you’re ready to buy.” username=””]
We’ve got people in Atlanta, Philip and Laura in Brooklyn, Ryan in DC, Stacy and Rory in Hawaii, Harrison up in LA and now Jacqueline in Denver. She got an escrow. She called and sent me a message on Instagram. That’s @DavidSidoni on Instagram. I put up all kinds of first-time buyer tips there too for everybody in cyberspace. She asked me for some information in Denver. I happen to know a couple of great and fantastic realtors who take care of first-time buyers and I got her message. Congratulations, Jacqueline. We’re feeling great for you. We want to keep encouraging you. If you want to read this stuff over and over again, help it sink in, I highly recommend that. The key with all this credit stuff is get started early, just like saving. Go ahead.
I hope these tips have been very helpful to you. Check us out on our website. Our Facebook page is always there too. We really appreciate you reading. Rate us and subscribe if you haven’t. There’s so much information for first-time buyers. We’re starting all the way back at three, four, five years ahead of time so we’re going to keep on going. I want to know what you want to know. I’ve got a list, two pages long of podcast topics. You tell me what you’re confused about, what doesn’t make sense about buying a home and I’ll give you the straight answer. When you go out there, you can feel like you know what you’re talking about. Remember, get educated, get informed because you can do this.
Important Links:
- SpeedyCreditRepair.com
- Episode Number Three – Previous episode What Do You Need To Know About Credit
- How to Interview a Realtor – Previous episode
- @DavidSidoni – Instagram
- Facebook – How to Buy a Home Facebook Page
This podcast was started for YOU, to demystify things for first time home buyers, and help crush the confusion. After helping first timers for over 13 years, I knew there wasn’t t a lot of clear, tangible, useable information out there on the internet, so I started this podcast. Help me spread the word to other people just like you, dying for answers. Tell your friends, family, and perhaps that random neighbor you REALLY want to move out about How to Buy a Home! A really easy way is to hit the share button and text it to your friends. Go for it, help someone out. And if you’re not already a regular listener, subscribe and get constant updates on the market. If you are a regular and learned something, help me help others – give the show a quick review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, or write a review on Spotify. Let’s change the way the real estate industry treats you first time buyers, one buyer at a time, starting with you – and make sure your favorite people don’t get screwed by going into this HUGE step blind and confused. Viva la Unicorn Revolution!
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