Do You Know How To Find The Best Mortgage Deal?

People will spend months or even years planning to buy their own home. They will work hard to build good credit. They will save a sizable down payment. They will search for the perfect house. Then they will settle for the first mortgage they see.

What is wrong with this picture?

It is important to remember that if you have good credit and a down payment then you are in the driver's seat when it comes to negotiating a mortgage. You are the dream customer that lenders want on their books. Even if your credit is not perfect and your down payment is nonexistent you are still an attractive client for many lenders.

Repeat this mantra whenever a lender acts as if they are doing you a favor by lending you money: I am going to give them a lot of money. Yes, you are. Over the next five to 30 years you are going to pay a lot of interest to this lender as well as repay the principal they originally put up. They are not giving you anything. This is a business deal and the lender stands to make a lot of money so you need to protect yourself to get the best deal you can.

While most lenders tend to make you think you should be grateful to them for taking this huge risk on you, it really is the other way around. A mortgage lender can't lose. If you honor the deal they will make a lot of money and if you don't honor the deal then they simply take your house back and keep the interest you paid in the meantime!

However there is an even bigger fallacy that lenders like to perpetuate. They don't want you to know how desperate they are for your business.  Look around and you will realize the truth of this. Check out the television, radio, and print ads that abound and you will see the mortgage lenders are getting pretty competitive.

That is why you simply must shop around to find the best mortgage deal available for you. In the end you could save yourself thousands of dollars. Here are five ways to help you find the best deal:

   ~ Shop around - Get quotes from various lenders. Look at local and national lenders and don't overlook the internet.
   ~ Compare terms - Interest rates vary from lender to lender but lenders offer different interest rates depending on the terms of the mortgage. How long will it be (15, 20 or 30 years)? Will it be variable or fixed?
   ~ Tweak some of the optional items that you control, such as the type of insurance you will carry and whether or not you will use escrow for taxes etc.
   ~ Adjust your down payment - Sometimes being able to increase the percentage of what you are putting down can make a difference in the lenders terms (similarly buying a less expensive house will work the same)
   ~ Haggle - Yes! Lenders often act as if their rates are written in stone but this is not the case. This is where shopping around can really come in handy. If you can show that you've got a slightly better deal with another lender then sometimes another lender will lower their rate to beat the competitor. Hey it's worth a try!

Just remember that you are in control of your future. You can choose whether or not to accept a mortgage lenders terms. There are a lot of lenders out there so you do not need to sign with the first offer you receive.

One last hint: It might be best to go through this process before you've found the home of your dreams! You can get preapproved for a mortgage with most lenders and that removes the pressure and worry of losing the home of your dreams while you negotiate with a lender. It also puts you in the driver's seat when you are negotiating to buy that dream home when you finally find it if you already have a mortgage ready to go.

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Refinance & Mortgage Tips: Your Down Payment Is Key

If you are buying a house, the first thing you need to figure out is how much of a down payment you can afford to make. This may seem like the sort of advice your father would give you, but rest assured there are a few reasons why knowing what you can put down and where you’ll get the money can make all the difference when shopping for a house and a mortgage to finance your new purchase.

Before you pick up your local newspaper and browse the real estate section looking for a new house, call up your banker, your accountant, or your spouse and find out how much you’ve got in savings and liquid assets to make the down payment and pay the closing costs on your mortgage.

First you must consider the source of your down payment, because this affects how much of the down payment your lender will actually attribute to you the applicant for the purpose of qualifying you for loan programs and determining your rates and payments. If the money is from your savings and securities / investment portfolio, be sure you can prove it. If you have employer retirement tax deferred accounts, 401(K) 403(b) accounts etc. and would like to use those as a source to finance the down payment, the lender will likely have several special conditions and limitations on the treatment of those funds. If you are receiving the down payment in part or in total as a gift, your lender will have another set of rules which will affect your payments. How you pay for closing costs will also have some affect on your final rates and payments; the more you take from a third party like the seller, the more risk the bank assumes.

A rule of thumb about size: the bigger the better when it comes to your mortgage down payment, at least from the perspective of programs, rates and payments. The more you put down out of your own savings, the lower your payments and the broader your selection of loan programs. An added benefit is that more money down means that any blemishes on your credit report or a low score count for less and less the more you pay upfront, and you also reduce your income requirement by improving your debt to income ratio. By knowing how much you can put down, you will know in advance how much house you can be qualified to purchase by your mortgage lender, get that mortgage pre-qualification letter, and know what to put in your purchase offer with your realtor, lawyer and seller when it’s time to make an offer. By finding out what you can afford to put down, you can get a head start on knowing your overall homebuying budget, financing options, and also have time to take care of the documentary requirements, seasoning and time-sensitive pre-requisites associated with closing your deal, saving you weeks if not months of wasted time sorting out these matters after you’ve found the house of your dreams.

So find out what you can put down and where you can get it from, contact a mortgage broker to find out what you can afford and what you can do with your down payment and documentation to get the best rates, payments and terms, and then take a pre-approval letter from the broker with you to start shopping for homes with a full knowledge of what you’ll be asking for and writing on the contract.

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Mortgage & Refinance Tips: Determining Your Income

When you apply for a refinance, debt consolidation or purchase mortgage, one of the most important factors in qualifying for the loan is your income. That may not seem like much of a surprise, but you may be surprised at all of the different ways your income can be calculated based on how well you can document it, and how much this can affect your loan process. Get a leg up on the loan officer and learn how to determine your income yourself.

Your lender looks at your income on the basis of how well you can document it, and will allow you to borrow more money at lower rates the more you can document your income. If you have been in your job for a while and have years of W2 statements, IRS filings, and bank statements you probably fall into the Full Documentation or “Full Docs” basket. Typically you can borrow the most money as a percentage of the property’s value with a full doc income verification.

If you are on a salary and you get two checks a month, take the gross amount before taxes on your check and multiply by 2. That’s it, that’s your income (of course you’ll need to present a little bit more documentation to the lender!).

If you get paid once every two weeks you can multiply the gross amount before taxes on your check by 26 (as there are 26 pay periods in a year) and then divide by 12, the number of months in the year.

Hourly employees should multiply their hourly pay by 173 to get their monthly pay, unless of course you earn substantial overtime or commissions.

In the event you earn substantial overtime or commissions/bonuses, you will have to pull out your W2s from the last few years and average them, usually just the past two years are used. So add up all sources of documented income for each year and divide by 24.

Self-employed / 1099 individuals should pull out Schedule C of their last two tax returns, add up the Profit line (which indicates how much money you told the IRS you made) for both years and divide by 24.

If you earn money from rental of a property or any part thereof, you must have a legal rental contract and necessary local approvals to rent the property just to include the rental income at all, and you will only be able to use a portion of this rental income because lenders will assume that there is some risk of vacancy in the future.

If you cannot fully document and verify your income or the bulk of it comes from commissions, bonuses or self-employment you may be able to apply on the basis of “Stated Income”, where if you have a sufficiently high credit score (in most case 620 or better but in special cases as low as 580) you are allowed to simply state to the lender what your income is. Stated income loan programs generally reduce the amount of money you can borrow in a cash out refinance, debt consolidation or purchase loan, and people who are on a fixed income such as social security or pension are not eligible for stated income programs. There are also a variety of limited document programs and even no document or “no docs” mortgage programs available for people with good credit and fixed incomes who need to borrow less than 70% of the value of their property.

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