Start used and work your way up ?.........Cash can be king sometimes!

You'll have to work on your instant gratification if you ever hope to become debt-free. It is a matter of seeing the bigger picture. Tape a picture of the RV of your dreams on the frig and keep that in your mind so that when you are tempted to buy something really unnecessary or splurge, you'll be reminded of the real cost of that item, delaying the RV dream.

Lucky Mike & SnowGypsy you are both so right. :) Thanks

We put a mighty healthy down payment on ours but none of the finance companies or banks that the dealership went to would touch us. Our credit union had no problem and even got a better rate than the banks were offering. Our problem wasn't too much debt. Our problem was that this real dumb guy forgot to make a payment on our rental house about 6 months ago. Even though it was brought up to date as soon as we were aware it still counted against us. We are signing the papers on that house today. I won't make that mistake again...errr I mean the dumb guy won't make that mistake again. Yeah, that's what I meant.

Pay down as much revolving debt as you can. 15-20% down helps a lot. Also make sure that no where on the paper work was the word FULLTIME. We didn't even tell the dealer what our plan was.

The creditkarma.com website is very helpful in determining exactly what will make the biggest impact on your current credit situation. It costs nothing, doesn't ask for a credit card number, uses your specific numbers to answer your questions. It gives three different scores, including the one auto insurance companies use to determine your insurance rates.....

For example, on mine I was able to tell how many points my credit score would increase by paying off different things and different amounts. I paid them off and in fact my score increased within thirty days by the amount it said .

You can access the information daily with no impact on your "inquiries" rating. It also has a lot of general information that stands alone from the paid advertisements.

Didn't mean to get on a rant there......I've just found it a very helpful site for us as we get closer to reaching our goal of debt-freedom.

Impulse control sucks.......but man-o-man that reward at the end is going to ROCK!

Jodee

Keep your heads up, things will come around. Yes you can always start off small and move up in steps.

My DH and I had great credit until we got hit with a bazillion hospital bills. Even though we made payment arrangements are sloowwly paying them off, our score is as low as the ocean floor. We found a nice unit at a dealership and we did qualify for financing, however the interest was so high we would have ended up paying more than we would have paid for a S&B house. We politely thanked the salesman for his efforts, after all, he had nothing to do with the financing, and walked out.

A few weeks ago we found a used fiver on Craigslist, an older model but in A-one condition and with the floor plan we wanted. Bought it cash for one third of what we would have paid the dealer. Now we are waiting for our front yard to dry up (so it won't sink out of sight in our Georgia mud hole) to test every thing and start remodeling (did I mention that we have customized every unit we've owned?) and get it ready to go.

Many RV owners take very good care of their units and you can find "by owner" gems at very reasonable prices. No unit is perfect when it comes off the assembly line. We have found that by the time we buy them, the previous owner have already taken care of any major issues. A little elbow grease and some redecorating has saved us a lot of money.

One thing we learned when discussing with the insurance company as to why they use a credit score was that if we had credit cards with high limits, even though we paid off the small amounts we charged each month that the "possibility" that we might max them out did affect the credit rating so we called and brought all the limits way down and told them specifically that we did not want them automatically increasing any of the limits. We kept getting those letters "Congratulations your credit line has been increased." and I would say "Yeah, like we would ever charge that much." and just ignored them. Something to take into consideration.

And, manycats, way to go!

I just tried the Credit Karma site, and it asked for the last 4 of my social. Then I got a message saying they couldn't find my info without my full social. Did you have to use your full ss to get it to work?