As with anything you do, before you take out a loan, especially with the way the world is today. You need to sit down and figure out your income as well as out go. Deciding how much money you have left over at the end of every month, will help you know how big of loan you will be able to afford to pay back. Now you can skip this step and just let the loan companies figure it out, but if you do this yourself first, you will be armed with more information and if a bank or loan company questions whether you can afford to pay back the loan or not, you can compare what you have listed regarding income vs. outgo, compared to what they have listed.
The next step I would recommend before attempting to find a place to provide you a loan is obtain a copy of credit report. You can get an online report from all three bureaus for free once a year. Now there are places all over the place that will tell you that you can get credit score for free and sometimes if you have a credit card, they will include that service for you. However, typically getting your score is not free; there is a fee of sometime even if it is a monthly membership fee. If you are willing to pay the fee for the number, then you can. However, the only thing that is really important is looking at report from all three bureaus and making sure there are no mistakes on there. Also look to see how many companies have listed you as a charge off or as behind more than 30 days. If there are no mistakes and you have no bad marks on credit report than you are way ahead of most of the population out there today. However, if you are like the average person, it is possible you have at least one charge off or have been behind more than 30 days on some creditor. And do not forget that these can appear on your report for up to ten years.
If you have some bad marks on your credit report, find out how old they are. If they are older by more than a year and either charge offs or now paid up to date, then just be prepared to be upfront with the bank or loan company prior to them running your report about whatever caused you to get behind at one time. If any of the marks are recent and say you are behind more than 30 days, then the first thing you should do is catch up all your debts and try to stay current for 60 days before applying for a loan.
The last thing you should do is then go to your local bank where you have an established checking account and possibly a savings account or apply for a loan. The reason for this is because these people know you already. They are used to seeing your account on a regular basis, they can tell if you have been in the red recently or if you have never been overdrawn since you opened the account. They also know if you when you get paid even if it is direct deposit or if you still deposit your check every week, two weeks, once and a month.
There are a good many resources to check latest credit report for free and suggest you best ways to apply for cash. The best one that is free and covers all three credit bureaus is MyReviewsNow.Net
