If you are considering purchasing a house in the near future, but you know you have terrible credit, you need to get a head start on this process now as it could take some time to repair. Don’t wait until the last minute. Start now. Let’s review why starting to re-build your credit now will pay off in the future.

Before you start your credit repair journey, you need to ask yourself, how committed are you to the process? Re-building your credit takes a lot of time and effort. For most cases, it’s not as simple as paying someone a monthly fee and just forget about it. You actually need to do some work yourself. If it was as simple as paying a credit repair company $200 a month for 6 months then everyone would have an excellent credit score.

The credit repair company you hire should develop a plan of action. They should be able to give you a score simulator that will predict your future scores based off of removing the negative items on the report. There may also be some debt and collection accounts that need to be paid or resolved. Again, all this takes time. There is no magic wand someone can wave and BAM, you have good credit again.

So, if you are up for the challenge and you know you are committed to the process of repairing your credit, get started now. Not later. Find a credit repair company that is reputable and has great reviews. Your mortgage lender or real estate agent may have some recommendations for you, so ask them if you need to.

If you want to take advantage of the best loans available to home buyers today, then you need to meet the minimum credit score requirements. Different loans have different requirements. And keep this in mind, the better your score is the better your interest rate will be. Which saves you tons of money over the years.

Anyways, let’s quickly go over the minimum credit score requirements for the most common mortgage loans out there.

FHA Loan: 580 or better

Conventional Loan: 620 or better

VA Loan: 580 or better (each lender may have their own requirements, this is just a general average)

USDA Loan: No minimum set, but most lenders want to see a 640 or better

Do you know how simple or complex your credit repair will be? If you applied for a mortgage and were denied, your lender may have told you what you should do to get to the qualifying range. Boosting your credit score could be as simple as opening a credit card and paying on it for a few months, or it could be extremely complex issues like removing several collection accounts and paying off a lot of debt. Whatever the case is, you should have some sort of direction after you apply for a mortgage. If you haven’t applied for a mortgage, just go ahead and do it regardless for those reasons. Even if you know you will get denied. If you don’t want to, then find a credit repair company to work with that can point you in the right direction.