Why you should prep for a mortgage before you start house hunting. Early planning lets you manage debt, boost your credit score, and move fast when you find the right home.
Three reasons why you don't want to wait to get a clear game plan in place for your next home loan. Number one, paying down debts. I hear it too often, clients that are a few months out for wanting to purchase a home because they want to wait, they want to pay down some debt balances to help their approval amount get better. Well, little do people know, sometimes those moves don't actually free up more room for the home loan. For example, I see so many people that want to pay down their credit card balances in hopes of qualifying for a higher purchase price amount. However, in the mortgage world, we don't go off the balances, we go off the minimum monthly payments. So if you still have that credit card open, which typically you will, the overall approval amount generally doesn't change. So you could have reassigned that money to something else that would have taken you further along. And we can help you put a game plan in place up front, even if you're months out. Number two would be the credit score. Oftentimes people want to pay down their balances to also boost their credit score, which makes total sense. We want you to have the highest credit score possible. However, we don't want it to be a guessing game. And that's kind of what seems to happen. Sometimes people will have credit karma or the Experian app on their phone. Well, those are the consumer based scores. That's if you're getting a credit card or an auto loan. That's not necessarily your mortgage based credit score. That's the world that we live in. So we can help you and see exactly what the best moves are to get your mortgage credit score as high as possible. So that actually helps your interest rate when it comes to a home loan. We can map all that out up front. And having a few months to work on it allows you to take the credit score to higher places. And number three would certainly be don't miss the house. I've seen so many times where people want to wait. I'm not quite ready to buy, I'm not quite ready to buy. Then all of a sudden the phone rings because that perfect house just came on the market overnight and now they need to scramble get together because other offers are getting in in front of them. Had they had it all ready to go a few months back like advised, then it wouldn't be a scramble. They could put their offer in. They could put their focus on actually getting the house and not collecting pay stubs and W2s and that type of thing. So three big reasons to make your home buying process stress free.
