Welcome, Little Guys
Ok, you were stupid and you completely ruined your credit. Were you using credit cards? Did you run up a bunch of bad credit? Now you can't pay your minimum monthly payment or that's all you can pay and you're going deeper in debt and you're gaining more and more credit problems. Maybe you have loan credit problems because you bought a house for half a million dollars that was, in reality, only worth $150,000, expecting to sell it for ¾ of a million? You got caught up in the real estate frenzy and you got burned. Did you run up a humongous credit card debt with lots of great credit card rewards? Now, you can't afford the minimum payments and so you lose all of those credit card rewards points. They're gone in one foul "poof." You're now broke, right? Easy come, easy go. But, man, was that painful? And it gets worse if you don't know what to do next. Let's hope you've learned your lesson and you're ready to live life realistically and responsibly. So, what do you do now? That depends on how serious you are about repairing your credit and living within your means. If you have hit bottom and are now facing reality, you KNOW you've got to do something or you'll literally be living with collection agencies hounding you for the rest of your life. You KNOW they'll find you no matter how many times you move or how far you go. So, why not do the noble thing and legitimately repair your credit? You can go to a rip-off artist while they take your money and keep you hanging on or you can do it yourself and do it right the first time. I know how long it can take to repair your credit. When I was younger, I thought that the road to riches was paved by simple, easy real estate deals. So, I and my then wife decided to buy a duplex. The problem is that the old adage that refers to how to make money in real estate, "location, location, location" is absolutely true. Being new to real estate, I purchased the duplex in a really deteriorating part of town. Another of my problems is that I'm easy. Yep, at least I was when I was much younger and a heck of a lot more naïve. When you mix those two conditions into real estate, you come out with a losing proposition. At first we were able to rent the duplex to a lower class type of people. Well, the vast majority of folks in this class don't really take care of their living abodes. There are several reasons for this: As a young real estate entrepreneur, I was not savvy to their games and their ruthlessness so, being unable to collect rent (because I was so easy), I fell further and further behind on my payments and the property fell further and further into disrepair because I lacked the funds to keep it up. So, again, I was forced to turn to my credit cards which I could not afford either. Eventually, this caught up with me and the creditors started calling me wanting their money. I tried to sell the properties with every method I could think of and no one wanted them. I even tried to give them away to someone who would just pick up the payments. No deal. My wife ran off with someone else and took the two kids and I was devastated. Eventually, we divorced. Finally, I simply let the finance company have them back. BIG mistake! For the next seven years of my life, I lived strictly on cash and paying minimum monthly credit card payments. I had to rent my living quarters, I had to drive an old beat up car and make due with making all repairs on it myself and buying all the parts with cash (if I had it at the time). I was caught between a rock and a hard place. While I had a job but not the greatest supply of cash, I still couldn't rent cars when I traveled out of town, I couldn't buy airline tickets with a credit card and many other inconveniences came my way but that's the way of the wayward idiot. I persevered. Let me tell you, it was a very long seven years. However, during that time, I was slowly but surely repairing my credit. I was using methods that my future wife knew about because she was in the banking industry and knew credit, it's ins and outs and how it worked. She didn't know everything about it but she knew what worked as far as repairing it. I started paying more than the minimum monthly payment on my credit card debt and eventually, I was able to pay off that debt. Eventually, I crawled out from beneath that rock and started over. I went to college, while working full time, and learned a trade that would keep me employed in just about any economy (nursing) and I got a good job when I got out. I learned a LOT about money, investing, credit, credit repair and most of all patience, during that seven year stretch. I know that I never want to go through that again. It was tough. I learned from my mistakes and I'm trying to pass some of what I learned on to you. Now, I've got a Master's Degree, a loving wife and my two children from that previous marriage are grown and I have one grandchild. Both of my kids went to college and have successful careers of their own. I have only two credit cards and I use them all the time but I pay the balance off every month and earn credit card rewards points which I use to travel. Time does heal. That's why patience is so very important. We live in an age when immediate gratification is very popular and in great demand. Unfortunately, immediate gratification is rarely what's best. The best things "come to those who have patience." I found that this is the ultimate truth. The "now" generation is, unfortunately, going to have to learn this lesson the hard way. So, if you find yourself in a similar boat, don't fret because there are methods available now that were not available to me in those days. With the sub-prime mortgage debacle and so many people losing their homes, their jobs and humongous amounts of credit, the economy is going to suffer for a while. Do you think that our government is going to allow that to happen? Not for long, my friend. If the economy is bad, it reflects on each member of Congress and they will lose their very cushy job if their constituents are unhappy about their money situations. They will find loopholes for the effected persons to repair and gain their credit back in much less time than I had to suffer. Without people using credit, there's not as much spending taking place and without spending, the economy falters so they've got to find a way to get all those defaulted loans fixed and the people whose credit was destroyed back into good financial condition again so that they can start to spend money, using their credit cards and bank credit. So, I assure you, there are ways to get this done in much less than the normal seven years. You just have to know how to do it. With time there have been other advances in financial society as well. The suffering time is less with knowledgeable credit repair techniques and there are also ways to still get credit and use it while awaiting your personal credit repair to take place. Yes, You can still get a lot of things financed while you await your integrity to be restored. Just be very careful and remember that you MUST pay these loans off too. Don't even think about getting one of these loans if you don't have a means to pay on them every month, on time! This is a great way to help restore your credit rating (if you do pay them off). Bad credit ratings don't always effect every person if they know how to use special techniques to get those loans. I offer you some resources. These folks are the experts and know the specific techniques to use in order to quickly repair your credit. The fact is, if you are going to ever get ahead after developing all of your credit problems and debt problems, you are going to HAVE to get that credit repaired. The quicker the better. Don't be caught in the twilight world between good credit and ruined credit. You will suffer without having decent credit. You can find a local credit repair representative and pay out the patooti, you can look on the Internet and try to find help, again the cost is pretty high or you can do it yourself with the right knowledge. It's your choice and we offer some excellent resources for credit repair: Guaranteed Bad Credit Financing
1. They don't intend to pay you anyway. They may pay the first or second month's rent but then they fall further and further behind and about the time you are ready to evict them, they turn up missing one day. They moved overnight. They don't have THAT much personal material so it is not difficult to move to another location. They also don't have credit problems. It does not matter whether or not they signed an iron-clad lease. Even if you sue them, they have nothing to pay with, no reputation, credit debt or integrity and nothing to lose so you'll never get your money no matter what you do.
2. It's not their property. Every time something breaks or stops working, they'll call you expecting you to either fix the problem or have someone else fix the problem. Either way, it costs money to have the problem resolved. If you fix it, the next week you'll be back fixing something else. All the while, you are using your credit card and building up more credit card debt. The renters will tell you that they won't pay you rent unless you fix whatever the problem is. This is one of their ploys. Come pay day, they'll give you a portion of the rent to appease you a bit, claiming that something-or-other didn't work all month and they're not going to pay you for something that doesn't work, etc. It doesn't matter what you say or do, they'll always have some reason not to pay you. This is their modus operandi. It's just a game they play in order to get much reduced or totally free rent. All the time, they're eyeing another place where they can move and play the same game all over again.