Tag Archives: financial history

Secured Loans and Unsecured Loans- What's the Difference?

Whether you’re new to the world of financing or you’ve done this a number of times before there’s always more to know about your options and what is out there so you can decide what will work best for you and your circumstances. One of the first basic decisions you have to make is whether you want to apply for secured loans or unsecured loans, so, what’s the difference? This article goes over where these options differ so that you can decide what is important for you and your financial situation.

Unsecured loans are based on your financial background, focusing on your income, and your credit history. This is all they have to look at and base their decision to lend to you on. When a lender looks at your credit history they are trying to decide how much of a risk you represent—the risk being that you won’t make your monthly payments on time. When you have a lot of late and missed payments in your financial history this tells them that you are likely to not pay on time. When you are considered a high risk applicant they are less likely to approve your application at all, and when they do, the worse your credit is worse the higher the interest rate they offer you will be. Another key difference when compared to secured financing is that they are much faster to get approval for because there is no evaluation process. All they have to look at is your history and your income, which won’t take them long to judge.

Secured loans are also based on your financial background, like your income and your credit history, but use collateral in addition. The collateral takes the pressure off of your financial history, but that history does still matter. The collateral will be taken if you fail to make your payments. Because there is a way for the lender to recover their money they will be much more likely to approve your application with an iffy credit history, and are going to offer you a better interest rate than they would otherwise. It does take a bit more time however because whatever you are using for collateral has to be appraised to determine it’s worth.

So what option works best for you? This depends on what your needs are exactly. Everyone wants the best interest rate they can get! But is approval time important, and what is your financial history like? These are questions you should ask yourself before determining what is the right path for you when you’re looking at secured loans and unsecured loans.

Building Credit for a Home Loan

Building credit for a home loan takes a bit more of a focused plan than financial improvement for other goals. If you’re looking to apply for a mortgage you want to have a detailed plan, with a time line and small goals marked along the way. This focus doesn’t mean this has to be difficult, even for the worst financial history, in fact, having this plan will really simplify things and take the worry out of your hopes and dreams of owning real estate.

The first thing you need to do is get a copy of your credit report. This is where your score comes from, so anything you need to work on is listed there. When you look at at this page you first want to look it over for mistakes. Just because you have made past mistakes doesn’t mean the companies haven’t, too. Common mistakes include them marking accounts as overdue or even just open that are currently paid or closed; they’ll also often mark your credit limit as lower than it really is on some of your cards. One of the factors in calculating your score is the amount of credit available to you versus the amount you actually use.

There are two types of payments that make up your financial history, revolving (credit cards) and installment (loans). You want to make sure you have a good history built up with both of these types of payments to get a home loan. If you don’t have much of a history with loans you’ll want to consider getting a small loan for a car or other use and be sure to make the payments in full each month. You’ll want this to be small and take approximately a year to pay off. This will show you can handle making payments and paying something off in full.

The most important thing to keep in mind when building credit for a home loan is to make sure you make all of your payments on time and check your report at least once a year, if not more often.