Hello, This is my first post so please bear with me in patience. I've been lurking around a few credit forums and a lot of the information is a little old so I'm wondering if it's still applicable to the current economy and credit requirements. Here's the deal: I've ordered a copy of my credit reports. They're fail. Basically 10 derogatory accounts - all credit cards and the collections/charge-offs for those credit cards - but no judgments, public records, or bankruptcies. I'm a 21/m who built credit up to $10,000 in limits by age 19 or so thanks to having a great AU tradeline reporting from my father. I'd also like to be able to start a business in two years when my credit is squeaky clean. My plan is this: Year One: Dispute one tradeline at a time except Macy's or Bloomingdale's Rehab Macy's and Bloomingdale's Settle what I can't fix Open a secured credit card Open a personal wireless account with sprint ($250 deposit) Have someone cosign on a $1,000/12-month installment loan Save money to buy a $5,000 used car (I bought mine for less than $400 and it's getting old) Register a business, get a physical address and phone number, get a D&B # Apply for a cell phone, office depot or staples, and two more suppliers with D&B# Buy things periodically on all accounts and build credit Year Two: Get a 36-month used car loan for $4,000 and put $1,000 down with no prepay penalty Pay off in 12 months Ask for CLI on all accounts Ask to go unsecured on secured card Ask for deposit back from Sprint Open a second, "real" credit card Check personal FICO scores - if above 720, apply for more business credit, including LOCs. If not, reassess. Any feedback on this? Constructive criticism is welcomed and requested.
That's the slow way to build business credit and has some flaws in your process of building personal credit as well. One trick I've learned long ago is that there is nothing like having good credit for either business or personal credit. Excellent credit isn't built by starting with credit cards, secured or otherwise because it is very costly and the amount of credit you can get can be very limited by doing it that way. Car loans don't help all that much either unless you are buying a new vehicle. Paying off old debt is an even worse way to build credit because it puts a new and unwanted derogatory notation on your credit reports. Getting new credit for a company isn't hard if that company has good income. Same with a person. Starting a new company as a DBA with bad personal credit isn't going to happen. Basically speaking it works the same way as an old joke about an indian chief who was very poor. He went to the local banker for a loan and the banker asked the chief how many ponys he had. "No gottum pony", replied the chief and he got no loan. Years later they discovered oil on the reservation and the chief quickly became very rich. One day the banker came out to the reservation and asked the chief to put his money in the banker's bank. "How many ponies you gottum?", replied the chief. You got no ponies, (cash), you got no credit. That's the bottom line. Buying cars isn't building credit. Cars are not normally considered to be assets. They only decline in value. Best way to build business credit is to start a corporation. Not a trust or an LLC. Get a tax I.D. or EIN. Then set up a bank account for the corporation. Once you have that then go set up a corporate savings account in some other well known bank. Deposit money in the savings account, say $1,000 for instance. Go to the loan officer at that bank and ask to take out a 12 month secured corporate loan using that $1,000 as security. Take the money you get from the loan and go to a second bank and do the same thing then go to a 3rd bank and repeat the process. Then go to a 4th bank and set up a savings account, put the money from the last loan in that account. Wait a week and go to bank #4 and draw out enough money to make a payment on each of the 3 loans. Repeat for 3 weeks in a row then go back to each of the 3 banks and get them to release the funds they no longer need for security purposes. Put that in bank #4 and repeat for 3 more weeks and keep on repeating each week until the loans are all paid off. Then make sure they reported the loans as paid off with D&B. Now you have excellent credit with 3 banks. You can easily build from there and do so quickly. That works for people too provided they have no adverse credit. If they have adverse credit then that method won't do them any good. If you need income to build your business that isn't hard either. Takes work but isn't hard and don't need much in the way of cash investment to make big bucks. There are many ways to earn a great income on line with little or no investment and you can get going in a few short weeks, almost instantly (so to speak). People are earning huge bucks on line and have incomes in the 6 figure range within a year or less starting with almost no money up front and in many cases none at all. The trick is learning how to do it and that is the hard part. You can't do it by joining every stupid affiliate program you get as spam emails. You can't play the other man's game and make any money. You must have your own little game if you want to make real money. One way is by buying and selling the right domains. If you buy the right domains and use adsense on them to start them making money you can sell them at a huge profit. Selling a domain or two a week for $1,000 a pop isn't hard at all if they are earning at least a couple of dollars a month in adsense income. If they make more than that they can be worth much more. That's just one way to make lots of money on the internet. Building personal credit works the same way as outlined above. That method has been around for many decades now and still works today but not as easy to set up as it once was. There are far better ways to get rid of old debt and bad credit reports than paying off old debts and getting credit cards right off the bat. Those are the dumb ways to do it.
cap1sucks, thanks for the response. Basically, the idea is to show an income as a person and a business, right? Does the same business-building strategy work for personal credit? I've been interested in internet marketing for about three-four months but I never took the interest anywhere. I'm going to send you a PM in a few minutes, if you don't mind.
Its easy to do if you know how to do html and what is called BB coding. If you don't then you need to learn how to do html coding first although this forum also has an easy to follow set of instructions on BB code. Look in the tool bar at the top and find USER CP which stands for USER CONTROL PANEL. Click on that and scroll down to the settings tab and under that look for edit signature. Click on that and put in the code you want. Of course to get something like that set up you also must know how to work with RSS feeds and yahoo pipes. That's simple too once you get the hang of it. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Most web pages don't have RSS but most blogs and some forums do have RSS feeds. In order to use RSS you must have an RSS reader or some means of converting the RSS into an html format. Google reader is an RSS reader, Yahoo pipes is another type of RSS reader and there are a multitude of other RSS readers out there. I use Thunderbird as well. Thunderbird is an email client with a built in RSS feed reader as well. It is free and it really helps automate the process of dealing with large amounts of information coming in by both RSS and email.
