Personal Finance Tips

Christian financial planning is about creating a strong foundation for your financial life. Most people don’t understand the importance of a strong foundation for wealth accumulation.

Much of what we hear is RATE OF RETURN. Though this is important and to be sought after, it is not what produces the greatest of results.

A guy making 100,000 a year on average saves about 5%, or 5,000 dollars. He may go out and look for a high rate of return, say 10%. If he accomplishes his task, and gets 10% he will have increased his wealth 500 dollars. Great! But christian financial planning is a little different. By looking at this same situation, and taking a different approach, we could potentially produce greater results. If instead of focusing on risking his money, the focus was on recapturing even 1% of the other 95,000 dollars, this particular person would have, in essence, double his rate of return, and he did it with no risk. Now he not only has found more money, but can also make that money work for him.

Now, lets look a little deeper into the return on his savings. Within the 95,000 he is spending every year, do you think there could be some money he owes somewhere? He most likely has a mortgage, a car loan, maybe some consumer debt. Christian financial planning will teach him that instead of going out and risking his money he could actually “invest” in his own debt. He would still pay the same interest he would normally pay to a financial institution back to himself. He is now redirecting his lost dollar back to himself.

Christian financial planning is important, and understanding that the foundation of wealth accumulation is the most important part of the financial equation will do more for you than any rate of return could ever produce.

Credit repair begins with you. Many people have bad credit and they don’t even know about it or they think they have no way to repair it. Everyone has the right to see their credit reports and to repair their credit score.
I have listed the top 5 steps to credit repair and how to restore your credit today:

Top 5 Steps To Credit Repair

1.  Pay Your Bills On Time – This sounds like a no-brainer, but I can’t stress how important it is. One little 30-day late payment will set you back a year or more. Set up automatic payments with all your creditors. If you can’t make a payment, call your creditor and make something work so that they won’t report it to the credit bureaus. You would be surprised how many times this works.

2.  Dispute Negative Items – The main reason most people get denied loans is because of past negative items. A lot of the time these items aren’t even yours because of identity theft, reporting errors and other factors. The Fair Credit Reporting Act was implemented to allow consumers the right to dispute or verify any listing that is on their reports. 4 out of 5 credit reports contain errors, make sure yours is not one of them.

3.  Increase Debt to Limit Ratio – Two ways you can do this, keep your balances low and increase your limits. Always make sure your balances are below 35% if possible. Increasing your limits will help the ratio as long as you don’t increase your debt on those accounts too.

4.  Diversify Your Credit – This can difficult for some that can’t get a mortgage or car loan. Start with the basics, get a checking account with your bank with a line of credit. Get a credit card attached to your bank account. Then get a merchant store card. All these things will help your score by diversification A mortgage and car loan are the best ways to diversify, but take time to get up to.

5.  Contact Your Creditors – Creditors want their money too and they will negotiate to get it. Make sure you have talked to your creditors before paying off a bill. Use your leverage to negotiate the removal of the negative items upon final payment.

There are many factors that can contribute to low scores, but credit repair can help bring it back up again. I urge you to use these steps to repair your credit today and get your finances back on track.

In 2009, the leading credit repair service forced the credit bureaus to remove over 1 million negative items. See how 500,000 clients used these credit repair methods to get the credit score they deserved.