My credit history sucks, frankly. After my divorce 12 years ago, I had a very hard time making ends meet. It took ages to get in shape to get a house loan, and we’ve been late on that payment as well.
I’m going to attend school for massage therapy, and a loan would be helpful…but is there anything out there for someone like me? If not, I’ll be able to make payments to the school, but if something happens and I’d have to miss work for a couple of weeks (for instance), I’d be screwed.
There’s almost always someone out there willing to loan just about anybody money. Unfortunately those with bad credit histories will usually be screwed in interest rates to get any loan.
An unsecured loan would be the hardest thing for you to get and get you the worst interest rates. If you use your house as collateral then you’ll be better off. Of course, this assumes you have equity in the house (an equity loan).
You also might consider re-financing your home loan. Rates are truly as low as they have ever been. Depending on what your original mortgage rate was you might be able to get some money that way (essentially by saving yourself more money each month). Just call a mortgage company and ask. the initial look at your situation shouldn’t cost you a dime (although the actual re-finance very well might…shop around…those rates differ all over the place).
In the end just pound the pavement to lenders and see what you can do. You might try www.lendintree.com for starters.
Maybe you’d be better of getting a Department of Education grant or Financial aid package instead. The application can be a pain in the ass, but the intrest is low and repayment is way more flexable, and won’t further hurt your credit rating if you blow a payment.
I agree. You might want to consider a home equity loan. The rates won’t be as good as if you had stellar credit, but will be much lower than other loan types.
I have lousy credit, but my husband has OK credit. We went through www.lendingtree.com and got a few offers at 10% or so. Then, I went through our credit union www.dcu.org and got 7%. They based our rate and approval on his credit score, whereas many other places used a combined score.
It should be noted that you need not have put much money into your house to have equity in it…maybe even a lot of equity. After a year of owning a home I had personally put in only a few thousand dollars towards the equity (the amortization tables have you paying mostly interest for the first decade). However, housing prices in the area shot-up dramatically. So, say I bought my house for $100,000 a year ago but now I could reasonably sell it for $150,000 today. Even if I never put a dime in the house I now have $50,000 of equity that I can get a loan against. NOTE: You can also use that higher value to get out from under paying PMI…worth looking into as I thnk PMI is one of the biggest BS ripoffs there are.