A mortgage lender explains when late payments won't automatically disqualify you from getting a home loan. The timing, reason, and your current financial health matter more than a single missed payment.
Don't let a potential late payment take you out of the game for buying your new home. There's no specific rules that say you can't have a late on a credit card or auto loan or student loan, things of that nature. Of course, we're not advocating to miss payments, but hey, life happens. If there was a mistake made, a payment was missed, it's not the absolute end of the world. It's not a hard stop that you can't buy a house. Even something as drastic as a repossession on an auto loan, we actually can exclude. There's little tricks behind that. We can wipe that slate clean and not even look at it. A medical collection, we can wipe it clean. Other types of collections, we can generally get those removed. So there's a lot of different ways, a lot of different leniencies. Sure, some things in the mortgage world are super stringent, but being late on a payment here or there is not absolutely into the world mortgage late. So if you have a current mortgage or a previous mortgage that you were late on in the last 12 to 24 months, those are a little bit more scrutinized. But you still can have possibly one or two mortgage lates in the last year and still get a new home. So again, this is where you have experts do their thing and review. But don't take yourself out of the game too soon. There could be help for all situations.
