Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa June 2013 | Page 30

FINANCE

BY NEALE PETERSEN

How To Get Yourself
Part
Off The ‘Blacklist’
Your step-by-step guide

T

he global financial crisis has taken its
toll on economies and on individuals
all around the world, many of whom
are struggling to make ends meet. Many
over-indebted homeowners and investors had
properties repossessed, as they could no longer
meet their mortgage bond requirements. This
eventually resulted in many banks taking
legal action on thousands of over-indebted
companies and individuals, which has resulted
in many people having judgments, bad credit
records and administration orders against them.
Almost 50% of South Africans have bad
credit listings today and this can be detrimental
for them going forward in terms of getting a
mortgage bond, renting a property, getting a
personal loan or any type of credit for that matter
from any financial institution or registered
financial provider. In addition to that, getting
a job can be difficult as well as your dream of
running a company can be halted due to your
bad credit record. REIM has partnered with

28

June 2013 SA Real Estate Investor

credit repair specialists My Budget Fitness
to help indebted individuals and investors to
get themselves back on their feet from a credit
perspective. We show you a detailed step-bystep guide of how to get yourself back into
creditworthiness.
Understand that the process of credit
worthiness is a fairly lengthy process and
that will only be successful if all the steps are
followed thoroughly. Should you wish to speed
up the process it is always a good idea to get an
attorney with experience to represent you.
Here are the detailed steps to start your
journey back to a clean credit record. It is
important to follow each step carefully. Meyer
de Waal, a practicing attorney who created the
programme of Budget Fitness, represents one
company that specialises in getting their client’s
credit records clean. It is best to use attorneys
such as them that specialise in this area to
rehabilitate you to credit worthiness.

1

Step 1 - Source your credit report
a. Get your credit report. By law you are allowed
at least one free credit report per year from each
of the credit agencies.
b. Assess the state of your report and your
financial profile. Understand and know which
listings are tainting your name.
c. Check for errors on your report and apply to
have these errors rectified before you apply for
credit, as a lender may reject your application and
this may cause a delay with finance application.

Step 2 - Focus on the 4 main credit
bureaus first
There are a number of credit bureaus in South
Africa, but you should focus mainly on the top
4 namely:
• TransUnion
• Experian
• XDS
• Compuscan
www.reimag.co.za