Personal Loans and Bad Credit: Four Steps to Land a Loan Offer, Regardless of Your Credit Quality!

Bad credit may happen to everybody. A prolonged illness or unemployment, leading to inability to make timely payments on loans and lines of credit, unforeseen expenses, requiring immediate cash injections and making other bill pile up, a painful divorce, leading to property loss or debt accumulation, and many others. What separates good credit from bad are truly a couple of months worth of late payments. The way from bad credit to good is unfortunately a lot longer. Bad credit does not make borrowing needs go away, but rather sharpens the need for extra money. Unfortunately, lenders are one of the first ones to close their doors, once they see your financial difficulties coming. The good news is that there are some effective ways to get access to loans despite past credit problems – all you need is some knowledge and persistence.Get a Copy of Your Credit Report and Dispute Everything You CanBefore applying for any loans, you should know what is contained in your credit report. Major credit reporting agencies process millions updates to consumer files daily and make mistakes more often than you may think. Sign up for a free trial with one of the credit monitoring agencies and get your reports and scores from all major credit agencies. Do not forget to cancel your free trial afterwards. Once you have your credit report, carefully examine each item from every bureau. Credit bureaus may have erroneous information on their files and you should request them to remove it in writing. It takes about a month before you may see disputed items removed from your report. In some cases, removing few items from your credit report would increase your credit score enough to qualify you for loans that you were not previously able to get.Renegotiate Terms with Your Existing LendersIt is not the credit bureaus that make your report look bad - it is lenders, reporting adverse information. What you may try to do is to renegotiate some loan terms with your existing lenders. Explain the difficulties you are going through and make payment arrangements that are affordable to you. Make your first payment and ask your lender to remove information about your late payments from your credit report. Even if you only convince one or two lenders to do so, your credit score would raise significantly.Look for Bad Credit Lenders OnlineOnce you are in somewhat better shape credit wise, you should look for lenders, specializing in bad credit loans. Contact them and ask about the criteria they use when processing loan applications. You want to avoid applying with your personal data, as doing so would place inquiries on your credit file and lower your credit score. Very often, once you explain your personal circumstances and give your potential lenders an overview of your financials they would be able to advise whether it is worth making an application. Should you be advised not to, do not attempt applying, as it would only hurt your credit further.Use a Loan BrokerLoan brokers are great once you have exhausted all possible options. Very often, they have necessary industry connections and sufficient databases of lenders to make your application a success. Another benefit of using a loan broker is that they typically pull your credit report once and then submit the same copy to select lenders, avoiding multiple inquiries on your credit. Some brokers may charge you a nominal fee for their services, but most would not, as they get their commission from lenders.