Can I Repair My Credit On My Own?
No matter who you are or where you’re living, there’s just no getting around the simple fact that for the vast majority of us, our credit score is going to prove fundamental for building a financial life for ourselves. Just try to imagine a single major purchase you can make that doesn’t involve your credit score in one form or another. It could be financing your first car, or it could be buying a new gadget from an electronics store. It could even be becoming a homeowner for the first (or second, or third) time. What’s common between all of those scenarios? The importance of your credit score.
What Is A Credit Score?
Basically speaking, your credit score is a mathematical representation of how likely you are to pay back money you’ve borrowed. While there are a few different companies who calculate credit scores—and while you’ll have to get your credit report from somewhere, most likely either Equifax or TransUnion—anybody running your details to approve you for a loan, any kind of loan, is going to be checking out your score.
Of course, if everybody had a perfect credit score the system would collapse completely. As it happens, we don’t all have the scores we might like. For some of us who find ourselves in trying financial circumstances, what’s required is a technique called credit repair, which we can apply in Toronto, to get our score back to where it needs to be. Having a poor credit score doesn’t necessarily mean you’re financially irresponsible. Scores can tank for a whole range of reasons, including being the victim of identity theft, which isn’t your fault, not that it makes any difference to the lender.
On the other hand, if you’ve been consistently living beyond your means, your score is going to reflect that. If that sounds like you, then now is the perfect time to get familiar with credit repair techniques in Toronto. At any rate, it doesn’t matter for what reason your score isn’t as great as you’d like it to be, because the credit repair techniques in Toronto are the same for every scenario.
How Long Does It Take?
Now, one of the first questions you’re likely to ask as you begin to rehabilitate your credit score is probably along the lines of ‘Well, how long is it going to take?’ It makes perfect sense: financial matters are often the most stressful issues we encounter in our lives, so you’d like to have this problem done and dusted as soon as possible. The answer to that question is going to come down to a lot of personal factors specific to your situation. There’s no cut and dried, one-size-fits-all response, unfortunately. While we can’t give you an exact timeline, what we are able to do is present you with three of the best techniques you can apply to get your score back where you deserve it to be.
Keeping that in mind, we’ve put together a list of the three best ways you can go about repairing your credit. And don’t worry—you most certainly can repair your credit on your own. All over the world, even as you’re reading this article, people are putting their financial lives in order and repairing their credit scores. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to join their self-sufficient ranks.
Without further preamble, let’s get into our top three ways to practice credit repair in Toronto.
Step One: Take Stock
We’re loathe to paint any group of people with the same brush, but odds are that if you’re interested in knowing whether or not you can repair your own credit, there are steps you could have been taking to keep your finances in order that have maybe fallen by the wayside. This is natural, and to be expected. After all, if we never make mistakes, we never learn anything: that’s the reality of human behaviour, and it’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of. This section, though, will prove especially useful to you if that’s a fair description of your financial practices.
If that doesn’t sound like you, and you had your credit affairs completely in order before becoming the victim of some unfortunate circumstances that were out of your control, then this section isn’t likely to present anything groundbreaking to you. To tell the truth, you’ve probably been taking stock rigorously and attentively for a long while. Even so, we’d recommend you not to skip it, if for no other reason then just because it’s always helpful to go over things like this every once in a while.
The only way you’re going to be able to have an organized, tidy financial life is if you’ve got a comprehensive list of everything you spend money on. We don’t just mean the big things, either, like car repayments or monthly mortgage bills. We’re talking about everything: from how much you spend on food, to how much you spend on things like shampoo and soap, right down to how much you spend on your favourite hobbies. It’s not for us to tell you what you should or shouldn’t spend your money on—it is for us to tell you that you should be keeping track of it.
Approaching this problem head-on is likely to seem insurmountable. You spend money on so many things—how could you possibly keep track of all of them? Indeed, even the most cursory examination of your finances is likely to reveal four or five major areas, each of which have subdivisions, until you get right down to each individual purchase. But every credit repair journey in Toronto starts with a single step; and if you keep taking small steps, you’ll get there before you know it.
We recommend going about the problem in an organized, logical way. Start off with your most serious obligations: credit card statements, mortgage payments, and car loan repayments. These are likely the ones you’ve probably already got a good idea about, but write them down all the same. It’ll all be worth it once you’ve finally finished with your credit repair in Toronto.
Next, tackle your monthly expenses. These are likely to include things like groceries, utility bills, various household items of all descriptions. It makes sense to categorise the big things in terms of months, because—taking groceries as our example—while the amount may vary week to week, there’s going to be proportionally less variance month to month. That’s why we recommend taking everything you spend on groceries in a month and dividing it by four, to then get your approximate weekly expenditure. As you’re making these lists, keep them neat and tidy. Now is not the time to rush the process of performing credit repair in Toronto.
Now that you’ve got your catalogue of everything you’ve been spending money on, pat yourself on the back. Well done! That’s the hardest, most trying part of any adequate credit repair strategy in Toronto. Remember to keep the list updated with any changes that come along so you can stay on top of things without having to go through the entire process again.
Step Two: Make Some Tough Calls
At this point in your credit repair journey in Toronto, you hopefully have a complete list of everything you’re spending money on. The next step is tough as well, but in a different way. You’re going to need to sacrifice some of your creature comforts in order to get the most important debts out of the way as soon as possible.
When it comes to the algorithm that companies use to calculate individual credit scores, the most heavily weighted variables are credit card debts. This makes it an absolute priority to clean up these as soon as you possibly can, so that by the time the next credit report comes around, you’re already making improvements and practicing the credit repair techniques you’re learning with us in Toronto. While there are certain things you can’t cut back on, like food and electricity, we’re sure there are other areas you will be able to live a little leaner. Again, we don’t want to tell you how to live. But do your best to handle the outstanding credit card debts first, and your credit score will thank you later.
Once you’ve got the credit card debts moving, it’s logical to think that you should tackle the biggest monthly debts next, like student loans, for example. Perhaps a little counter-intuitively, we’re going to advise you not to do this. For one thing, after the credit card bills themselves, the next most important factor in the calculation of your score is paying back smaller obligations in full and on time. The thing to remember about the credit repair you’re learning with us in Toronto is that you’re trying to get your score moving sooner rather than later, and in the right direction.
Step Three: Change The Way You Think
At this stage in your credit repair journey in Toronto you’re learning using tips from us here at Torontobadcreditcarloans.ca, you’ve pretty much got the nitty gritty stuff out of the way. Once you have a list of everything you’re spending, and a framework for re-routing some of that spending towards the most beneficial debts for the calculation of your score, it’s time to get a bit less practical and a bit more abstract.
What you want to do is re-frame the way you think from the short-term towards the long term. Easy to say; somewhat less easy to do. And, again, though we don’t want to make assumptions, if you were thinking long-term to begin with, it’s not as likely that you’d be wondering how long it would take to repair your credit in Toronto to begin with.
It’s not a bad thing, to think short-term—as a matter of fact, we all do it as a part of our daily lives. But that’s just the point: your financial life cannot be lived the same way your regular life can, or you’ll be stuck in tricky situations for a long time to come. Whether it’s visualisation or simply writing your goals on sticky notes and taping them to your fridge, do whatever you can to re-imagine the way you think. It’ll pay dividends in the long run.
The Final Word
So the answer, in the end, is yes. You can repair your credit on your own, and you can do it by making use of these three credit repair steps from us here in Toronto. It won’t be easy, but it won’t be too difficult either. The most important thing is to be consistent, and to focus on the long term.
As an aside, if you’ve been having a hard time getting approved for a car loan because of your poor credit score, give us a call and help us to help you out of your particular situation.