If you have bad credit, you need to fix, repair, or whatever term you want to call it. Bad credit will affect you very badly. If you have bad credit, you can get rejected to open a checking account. That is usually when you had problems with other banks and NSF fees. There are a ton of things that will be haunting you. You will have a hard time finding a nice place to live, you will have a hard time buying a house if you are lucky, you will not get any credit cards, or anything else. There are a lot of ways to fix bad credit. There are companies that will fix your credit for you. There are a handful of places that are good, and while they are digging through your bad credit, they should tell you a list of things of what not to do in the future to preserve your credit. If you are the hands on type, then you could get a good book on how to repair bad credit. A lot of people do not realize that when they are out of high school, their credit report becomes their new report card. Your goal is to have an 800 credit score. That not only means that you have a lot of available credit to you, but it also means that you were able to manage your money well and gain the trust of banks. When you are fixing your credit report, the amount of work you will have to do will depend on how many things are wrong with your bad credit. Now, it will be different if you have a credit repair service do this for you, but if you are doing it yourself and follow instructions from a book you buy online, it can take you some time. It will be like a learning curve for you to fix your own credit. A bad credit fix or repair can take anywhere from months to years to complete. It will literally depend on how bad your credit is. There are affordable and inexpensive services that you can find online to fix your credit. So if you are a person who is not great at handling things like this, this is a good option for you to consider. There are a lot of happy people who have these types of services done. My friends had a credit repair company handle their bad credit and they ended up getting good scores. The company acted fast, and they were on top of fixing the problems that were on their report. So there are two good ways to do a bad credit repair, you can get a book and learn how to do it, or you can get credit repair services.