668 Credit Score: Is It Good Enough?

We all have to deal with credit scores. It’s a reality in our lives, if we plan on making big purchases such as cars or a home one day. Even the convenience of buying with a credit card instead of carrying cash is determined by credit scores. The lower your credit score is the more of hassle it is to make these purchases and the more money you will pay out over time for them.

We who have had bad credit or currently have bad credit know this all too well. And now a days there are no shortage of financial institutions that thrive on the fact that people have bad credit. We have to accept the downsides to doing business with them because we have no choice.

You will need to put down more money upfront on a purchase, your interest tacked on to the money you borrowed is a lot more and the duration of the loan is longer. So, you will pay more per month and pay that money back for a longer period of time. I have had to do this for a lot of loans through my adult life. Another downside, from my personal experience, when you go to buy a car your options are very limited. After running your credit the salesman will walk you across the lot to a select few cars and those are your only options. You pretty much have to take it or leave it.

668 credit score: is it good enough?

Well, a few weeks ago I had a call from my mortgage company about refinancing. I can refinance up to 80% of my homes value (this is the mortgage companies policy). This would pay off my existing mortgage balance and give me a good bit of equity in the bank. The credit score I would need for this is 620 they told me.

So, with a 668 credit score you are above that threshold! 

For this article I first got in touch with my bank to see what credit scores they require for their various types of loans and interestingly enough it is the same, 620. This is the beginning score to get approved. The higher the score the less interest the loan will have.

Then I did some research into other financial institutions. It seemed split, with some having a required credit score between 610 – 640 and others requiring a credit score of 690 and above. Finally, I looked to the credit reporting companies to see what they say about a 668 credit score.

Equifax and Experian both rank a 668 credit score as fair. Their fair ranking is 580 – 669. So, you only have a little bit of work to do to graduate and be considered “good”. Transunion assigns a number as their rank and a 668 credit score comes in as a C. A C ranking is 658 – 719. To graduate to a B ranking more work on your credit score needs to be done.

With all this information a 720 credit score is a good minimum credit score to have.

Your credit score is only half of the equation. The other half is your income and your debt to income ratio. It has to be well established that your ability to repay the loan is not going to be an issue. I have some further information about this below.

My suggestion to begin your credit journey is to first join a company where you can keep a close look on your credit score. I did this by joining Credit Karma. They are free and a great start to seeing my credit scores since they give updated credit scores for both Equifax and TransUnion. Click on the link below to sign up for free and view your credit scores.

 

 

I’m not much of a fan of this next step, but sometimes it needs to be done. I have done it and I’ve known many people to do it. Get a debt consolidation loan. If you don’t need one that’s great, you’re ahead of the game. For most of us, we have a lot of monthly payments going out with it not doing a lot of damage to the principle of the debt, just paying the interest. By eliminating all that random debt into one loan, you can pay it off a lot quicker by putting all that money toward this one loan.

Please note: this is not the time to spend the money you are saving and make more bills. The money you are saving is to be added to your one loan monthly payment, to pay it off. You must accept that this money will go there or you could end up in worse shape than you started.

Before I was talking about debt to income ratio. You might think you can’t get a loan because of the debt you have, but the great thing about loan consolidation is anything you plan on paying off is not counted as part of your debt.

Below is a company that can help you get out of debt in this way. They have a proven track record for helping people. The company is Sofi. The have excellent ratings and on trustpilot they have a 4.7 rating out 7,357 reviews. They are also FDIC insured.

To add to this, Sofi is going to give you $300 dollars if you let them help you get out of debt! Just click on the link below to start you exciting journey. And just to let you know the $300 is not skirted around like I have seen in some companies. You almost have to beg them to get what they had advertised. When you click the link, they say up front you are getting $300 if you get a loan with them and you will be helping me as well. The only bad part is that it is not available to residents of Vermont.

With your credit report, you must consider that there maybe some errors on it, there were a good many on mine. You can get a copy of all 3 of your credit reports and go over all your accounts and the notes and marks made on each. You can obtain these copies for free (and it won’t hurt your credit score) at annualcreditreport.com, this site is authorized by federal law.

Once you have made a record of all that you want to dispute go to each reporting bureau and submit the dispute. The creditor has 30 days to submit there evidence that what is being reported is correct. If they miss this time frame, by law, the credit reporting bureaus must take them off your credit report. I have another article where I go over, in detail how clean up your credit report – Credit Secrets.

 

I hope you have great success in your credit journey. Initially, within the first 45 days you should see some improvement in your credit score, especially if you have found a lot of errors in your credit report and was able to consolidate a lot of monthly bills into one payment.

After that, it will take time for your credit score to slowly move up, but it will.

 Thank you for your time and I hope this article gave you some insight.