Buying your first home

[Seittit]

Having a nightmare in dealing with mortgage lenders this week. I'm a first time buyer with pretty good credit (730-740ish), and enough money in savings to put up a 20% down payment and still have enough to pay a year's worth of mortgage. Surely getting a loan wouldn't be difficult, amirite? Well the loan process isn't too awful, but dealing with these mortgage lenders is awful; everyone I've spoken to is lying through their teeth about some facet of the process. I can't get a straight answer from any of them to save my life. One told me yesterday that my FICO score is actually around 670 and the only true online report is hosted through her systems. I sent her my reports from the big 3 bureaus, but she insisted that mortgage lenders use different bureaus that can't be accessed by consumers.

Anyone else have horror stories from buying your house?

[icecream-guy]

maybe it's your age,  I read an article a few weeks ago about how lenders are less and less likely to loan money the older one gets,  cutoff of about 35-40.  Citing the fact that people will have less money in retirement  and don't think you will have the income to pay your mortgage after you retire.

I got screwed over on a "great" deal when I bought my last one from a builder.  They stated that I could use any lender but.... I would loose all the incentives (e.g. free finished basement) if I didn't use their lendor.

The actual lender doesn't really matter, your loan will be sold off to one of the big clearing houses. so the little guy can get his money back next month. so go with the best deal you can find.

 

[deanwebb]

It gets worse... 20% of all mortgage brokers/dealers have a felony conviction. Not just charge, CONVICTION. This speaks volumes of the slime in the industry. "Incentives" to use a particular lender mean there are kickbacks of some sort in play and that the deal will not be to your advantage.

I bought my home from its previous owner and used a mortgage company that my credit union referred me to. No problems at all with the mortgage process, just the normal nightmares of dealing with inspections and the previous owner going through a divorce at the same time, which made him a real treat to deal with...

Since 2007, though, mortgages have gotten insanely difficult to secure due to the fact that banks got burned so hard on subprime crap.

Maybe you might want to see if you get better headway buying a used home rather than a new one.

[SofaKing]

Have you looked into getting it from a local bank?  I bought my first house back in 2006.  I had the 20% down and a little more in savings.  I went with small local bank to get my mortgage and it was fairly smooth.  That was back in 06 though...  The original bank still has my mortgage and has not sold it.

I'm now looking to get a second house and move out of this one.  Not sure how smooth that will go.

[Otanx]

We used the mortgage guy our realtor  referred us to, and our realtor was referred to us by a friend. This was in late 2009 early 2010 (we closed 14FEB2010). We didn't have anything shady, but it was a pain. At first they wanted us to do a jumbo loan over 400 something thousand because both my wife and I were working in a war zone, and had very high income. Once we convinced them that was a bad idea, and that high income was temporary we got a loan approved. However, the loan people wanted written explanations for each deposit or withdraw on our accounts over $3,500 or something for the last year. Our pay checks at the time were over that. So we would give them the documents, and then by the time they looked there were more deposits that needed to be documented. Also while we were overseas my mom was put on our accounts to handle emergencies. They needed a letter from her saying the money was not hers. They asked for her financial documents as well because they wanted to make sure she wasn't trying to inflate our net worth somehow. It was just a pain. Especially as we were trying to find a house, and close in less than 30 days while on vacation before going back overseas.

When my brother bought his house in 2009. He got rejected for a loan due to lack of credit history. He lived with our parents, never had a credit card, and had only just recently bought a car. To fix this my parents put him on one of their credit cards that they have had for longer than my brother had been alive. He went from having a 6 month credit history, to a 30 year credit history (he was 26). This was just fine with the mortgage people.

I will say the biggest mistake I made was not paying attention to where I would be working in a few years. I bought near family without considering the jobs I would be working are 45 minute drives from there. I still love the house, and have no plans to move, just wish the commute was shorter.

-Otanx

[wintermute000]

Hahahahaha where I am the median house price is over half a million aus which is 400k usd. Screw inflated housing prices[emoji29]

If I moved to the US  and not new York etc I could buy a mansion with just my existing equity... sigh

[deanwebb]

Regarding proximity to jobs... I've been in my house for the last 22 years. For the first year, I was a mile away from work. For the next two, I was 15 miles away. Then I had a run of jobs: 20, 5, and 10 miles away. Then another that was just 3 miles away, which I left to go back full-time to the 20 place, even though that was almost always an hour commute, thanks to North Dallas traffic circa 2000. Ironically, 3 miles away was an outsourcer for the 20 miles away gig, and I got to go back and supervise staff there on the 11-8 shift. There are some real positives about that shift, by the way...

Went back to teaching and that was 11 years of 6 miles away from home. In traffic, that was 20 minutes. When I came back to networking, I had 6 weeks at a place 4 miles away before getting the gig at (gulp!) 50 miles away, from East Dallas to West Fort Worth. At least it's with the sun to my back, which is even more important to me than proximity. I hated the drive in the morning to 3 miles away, because it was always into the sun, since it was east of me. Therefore, living on the east side of an area is preferable to living on the west side, if you don't like the sun in your eyes.

Now I get to work from home a few days each week, so 50 miles one way is the case 3 out of 5 days. The other two, it's zero, and that's peachy keen. I have both the longest and the shortest commute with my current job. Ironically, it's almost as long a drive for me to work just 15 miles to the north, where I had another offer, because I have to use back streets to get there instead of main highways.

Caution on getting an older home, though... if it's not out of code now, it soon will be. Our house is about 60 years old, and it's about time to replace all the pipes and wiring in it before the house floods and electrocutes itself simultaneously. Looking at a second mortgage to take care of that and some medical expenses we had to run up on credit cards back when I had 100% crap health insurance.

[Nerm]

I have went through the process of purchasing a home twice and both were smooth and really no hiccups. Full disclosure though having one cousin that owns a real estate agency and another that is a banker does help.

[javentre]

I've had about 4 mortgages in the past 4 years, as the rates drop, I refi.  They're all 0 cost, so I do it as frequently as needed to keep rates going down.  The premium for a zero cost refi is usually about 1/8th of a percent.  I don't even have to monitor the rates, my mortgage guy calls me to tell me he can lower my rate.

The process has been fairly easy each time, I have no complaints.  They even send someone to my house to sign the documents.