Expert: Joe Montgomery - 5/24/2007

Question
Hi there. My name is Madonna,  I am 19 years old and my fiance is 28. We are trying to get a personal loan for between $3,000 and $5,000 to move about a hundred miles. We are both from Omaha, NE and we both have families and better job opportunities in that city. However, we live in a small town about an hour and a half away from all that and we're trying to get home. With fuel prices and small town wages, we save what we can, but it just doesn't seem like it's enough.

My fiance has a shaky credit history with over $8,000 of uncollectable by statute debt, and I have little to no credit history. So little, in fact, that pulling a credit report for myself online is impossible; there isn't enough information on the report to identify with.

Knowing our situation, what are our chances of getting ANY type of personal loan? We don't own any property, and our car is 12 years old. If our chances are slim, what can we do to better those chances?  

Answer
You're chances are very slim.  The only thing you can do is work to build good credit  which is difficult at best when no one will give you a loan.  You need to try to get 1 or 2 small department store credit cards to build credit.  It's going to take a few months as credit scores only update every few weeks.