Always do your mortgage homework
The house-hunting process starts at home. Before calling a real estate agent or thumbing through the real estate section of the Sunday newspaper, take a look at your finances. Know what you can afford. Understanding your financial situation can save you a considerable amount of time and aggravation. The best way to get a realistic view of what you can afford is to get pre-qualified or pre-approved. Friends, mortgage calculators and other informal methods may give you a rough idea, but nothing works like the opinion of a mortgage lender.When you first decide to buy a home, you will receive advice from everybody. At least a few will tell you the mortgage amount you can afford. Don’t pay any attention to them. Your next step may be to go to a mortgage calculator. This can help, but remember that the information you receive will not be accurate. It is a rough estimate that can help you get started.
You will not know what you can afford until you go through the pre-approval or pre-qualification process. Thus, your first call should be to a mortgage broker rather than a real estate agent. The mortgage broker will help you understand what you can afford, information that will shape the entire house-hunting process for you. Buy the time you talk to a real estate agent, you should know for how much you have been pre-approved or pre-qualified and what your monthly payments on that amount are likely to be. As a result, you will not waste time looking at homes that you cannot afford.
Your mortgage broker will work with you to be pre-approved or pre-qualified. Pre-approval and pre-qualification are similar, and they serve roughly the same purpose. The difference between these two processes is subtle. In both, you supply information to the mortgage broker about your income, debt and assets, and the mortgage broker tells you how much you can afford. Verification differentiates the two processes. To be pre-approved, the information that you provide to the mortgage broker has to be verified. The broker will call the bank, for example, where you have your savings account. In a pre-qualification, the mortgage broker simply accepts your claims.
Plan ahead. The first thing you should do when you decide to buy a home is talk to a mortgage broker about pre-approval or pre-qualification. This will tell you how much you can afford. All the house-hunting that follows will be much more productive, because you will be abele to focus on what you can afford.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home