My husband and I had gotten ourselves in a position that almost completely destroyed our credit. We got in over our heads with a mortgage loan that was not serving our financial needs and needed to refinance in a hurry to avoid foreclosure. Unfortunately, we had a poor credit history and could only qualify for bad credit loans.
Most of the other types of loans were out of reach. With our options limited and all the worry we had about the high interest ramifications of bad credit loans, we decided to do a little digging to find the best loan programs we could get, even if it was one of the bad credit loans.
All of the banks we went to told us of the relationship between poor credit history/scores and higher interest rates for consumers affected by poor budgeting skills. But for us it was not poor budgeting skills; we got stuck with serious medical expenses and an adjustable rate mortgage that reset while my husband was in the hospital.
Finally after a few weeks we started to poke around online and found out that the Federal Government was trying to make it easier for people in our situation. We were finally able to save our home with the help of bad credit loans that were FHA and VA approved.
When it was all said and done, we were able to lower our monthly payments by a couple hundred dollars a month. With my husband finally back in shape after his surgery, we found out about some of the things that were preventing us from getting better financing. Even though we got one of those bad credit loans to refinance our home, we now realize that we should have looked into credit repair, because some of the things that were dragging our scores down were wrong on our reports.