Saturday, December 6, 2008

Financial Correction Planning is Key to Credit Repair

The first step to personal credit management and credit repair is to have a broad planning perspective, a financial correction plan as well as a financial contingency plan. Your financial correction plan should include your goals, correction targets to achieve, and strategies to correct the, In addition, you need to set time frame for achieving these objections and you may consider using phases to set the milestones. Subsidiary to the financial correction plan is your financial contingency plan.

It is all too well to have a well written and well planned financial correction plan, but what is more important is your commitment to follow through with the credit repair activities to meet your set goals. Hence, implementation is more critical than simply putting your financial aspirations in words. Here are several trial and tested good practices inclusive with a free and simple to use financial correction planning tool which you should adopt for monitoring your progress in a disciplined manner. With reference to your financial correction plan strategies, you could do the following.

Make a Check List of your credit accounts you need to close, accounts you need to pay down, people you need to contact, as well as things you need to check out or research. The list can follow this layout with headers starting with corrective activities, target deadline to achieve, date started, date completed, progress and status. As and when you have completed each task or acted upon each activity, you will note the relevant information on the checklist and monitor your progress on a daily basis. One important aspect to note is that you will probably execute a few activities at any one time and hence need to monitor very carefully the progress of each.

This check list will serve as both a good monitoring tool as well as gives you a great sense of accomplishment knowing that you are taking steps to improve your finances. It serves to motivate you to want to achieve more. Ticking off the check list could be obsessive and in this instance, it is good to be obsessive indeed.

One error a lot of people tend to commit is setting your goals too broad. For example, setting a goal such as Improve My Credit Score is far too broad. Start with smaller goals with better results toward the big picture, such as I will pay off half my credit card bill by end of this month. Goal must be set identifying a task to be completed, a timeframe for action and its targeted completion deadline. That said, learn to work with a manageable deadline.

Written goals serves as great reminders so writing your goals on a calendar or planner you refer to daily or save your goals in your pda to motivate you to keep up the good work. The benefit of having goals written in somewhere preferably at home, where others could see is to have family members also encouraging you to keep working on your credit repair

Check your credit report Score for progress. Now that you have achieved some progress in your credit repair activities, you will want to find out how well your credit report score has improved. Give it a few months before you request for an updated copy of your report as bank and credit card records need time to be updated. Otherwise you will see little in the way of improvements to your score and be unnecessarily disappointed.

Remember that the small steps that can lead to better credit. Review you r progress weekly and monthly. Credit repair takes time and effort and if you stick to the financial correction plan and implement it religiously, rest assured that you will get closer to a better credit score.

Joey Lee is a CFP and MBA with 17 years of banking, financial, business & marketing experience and a Platinum Ezine Author. Learn authentic Credit Repair skills and comprehensive information on Credit Repair Tips, credit reports, credit scores at CreditRepairSkills.org

No comments: