GPG lost password

I have just generated 3 gpg while following the instructions from a web page. After the certificate was made there were instructions to go back into the certificate and change the expiration date on one and when I attempted to log in none of my passwords worked for any of the certificates. I did a lot of reading regarding this in the last 24hrs and I really dont care to recover the passwords, if theres a laeitimate way to recover them then fine but the certificates have not been used for anything yet...that Im aware of anyway, so deleting them is fine by me. But while I was researching on how to fix this I came across a page that essentially said that the certificates were copied to another location, a vault so to speak, and so deleting the certificates from my machine would only make it that much easier for a hacker, how ever remote, hack into my certificates and they could be used to do bad ends. So Im stuck, How do I fix this problem???