Re: Mortgage update

Posted by Don (64.203.129.94) on February 13, 2004 at 11:31:32:

In Reply to: Mortgage update posted by Andrea on February 13, 2004 at 09:49:58:

You need to shop around a bit more and do some more research on this. Anyone can get a home at anytime. No, of course the terms will not be the same as for someone with spotless credit. You will have to put a much larger down payment and have a higher interest rate, but you can get a loan. Did you know there are No-Income verification loans where you can say you make whatever and they never check? Yes, the down payment is huge, but you can get a loan. There are FHA loans that don’t even use a credit score. Just no negatives in the past year and no unpaid charge-offs. You can get owner-financed loans where the current owner takes back the mortgage. You can arrange a lease-to-own deal with owners where the contract for the first two years is a lease with an option to buy when your credit gets better. There are many, many alternative ways to finance homes. Don’t get gloomy and give up yet,, research the situation more on your own. Mortgage brokers work on commission based on the dollar amount of the loan. A $50k mortgage is as much work as a $200k mortgage, but the commission is only a quarter as much. If your case looks like a lot of work, and the commission would be low, then they will blow you off. I’ve known a few mortgage brokers who’d only do prime FNMA mortgages for big dollar houses. If someone called looking for a $50k mortgage with blemished credit, they’d immediately say it can’t be done and hang up on them. They’d hang up on people with spotless credit if the mortgage amount was too low and give them some reason why it couldn’t be done. Of course it could be done, but the commission was too small for them to spend any of their time on it. They only wanted to talk to people buying $250k houses with spotless credit. Easy, big commission loans. Do your own legwork on this.

Also, don’t get too caught up in the “homeowner” fantasy. Most people I know “rent” their homes from a bank for 30 years. If they miss a month’s “rent/mortgage” payment, they get foreclosed into the street the same as a renter is evicted. The semantics of owning/renting is very murky. Keep researching and look for other possibilities.

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