DH and I are renting an apartment now and would like to start looking for houses. We don't know if we have a chance in h*ll of being able to afford anything, but we figure we'll try. My question is this...how do you even begin? Should we go talk to somebody about mortgages first? Get preapproved? Go to open houses or a real estate? What do you do first?? When do you look for a real estate lawyer? We are locked into our lease for another year...is it too early to start looking...or maybe too late?!? This is all so overwhelming...and I thought planning the wedding was bad
DaniRN
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Re: ??? about the whole home-buying process
we got pre approved for a mortgage first.
Suzanne
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You should get pre approved first, this will give you an idea of how much house you can afford..you should ask family and firends if they have someone they used for their mortgage or refinancing that they liked. then you should start looking at neighborhoods and looking into the dchool distcticts ect.. looking for a house could take you a month or 3 years.. so i would start to look.. then when you get closer find a real estate attorney, i have one if you would like a recommendation..
Jenn524
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Not only get pre approved but figure out how much money you can afford each month. Just because the bank may give you a $500,000 mortgage doesn't mean that you can afford to keep that mortgage. You know your finances the best so make sure you keep it within your range. And don't forget to look into taxes when you're looking at areas also. The taxes can add anywhere from $300-600 a month on average for LI.
Once you figure out a price range start going to some open houses in areas that you're thinking of. It will help you decide what kind of homes you like, what's important to you, etc.
curly2003
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Exactly what Jen said. The banks are willing to let you borrow WAY more than you can realistically afford. Sit down w/ FI and figure out what you bring home and all of your expenses. Go from there.
MarciaD
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I agree with Jen and Curly. We figured out our budget prior to even starting to look. We knew the mortgage brokers would pre-qualify us for way more than we could really afford.
It helped a lot because we meet the broker knowing:
How much we could afford a month for mortgage payment
How much we could put down up front
The mortgage broker calculated for us how much of a 'loan' would work and stay in our monthly payment range. It worked out perfectly. And I have to say we did not have 'any' stress at all in our homebuying process becuase we did the work up front. We were lucky and found a house in 2 weeks...
Good luck
lesleyw
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Just a question -- did you all save up the $$ for the down-payment before you got pre-approved?
flyin'bride
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I would totally recommend a book that FH and I bought while we were planning to look for a house. It had tons of great information in it, from getting your credit in order to what to do at closing. Its called 'The Brand-New House Book: Everything You Need to Know About Planning, Designing, and Building a Custom, Semi-Custom, or Production-Built House' by Katherine Salant. I looked and its available on Amazon.com with some reviews and excerpts from the book.
Again, I would totally recommend this book to everyone who is looking into buying/building a house. [DH and I have been in our house for 11 months now ]
Good luck!
spel
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i have to agree with that. i would buy a book on the topic so you can educate yourselves in entire home buying process. it gets very overwhelming. i read 'the idiots guide to buying/selling a home'- i learned a lot.
you do not need a dp to get preapproved. however, if you have nothing saved, the bank may not preapprove you for much. there are certain mortgages that require 0 down. btw, prequalified & preapproved are two very different things. you want preapproval.
good luck!!
Kathy116
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FI new what he wanted to spend on a house...so then we figured out what was most important to us...we wanted a waterfront home, but were willing to sacrifice the actual house for a great location, because we knew we could fix up a house.
So, we just picked up those real estate magazines at the supermarkets month after month, and went on go-sees for a few months until we found our home.
Jenn524
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One more thing to add on about the down payment. Pre approvals are only good for about 90 days. So you'll need to come up with the dp within the 90 days and the Bank will ask you how you plan on coming up with it. Better to have the dp ready before you go for a pre approval.
If you're just looking to find out how much you can afford, ask for a pre-qualification. It's basically the same thing without them running your credit. This way you'll get an idea of how much money a bank might be willing to lend you. But don't count on it until they do a full background check on you.
Jenn524
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here's the difference between the 2:
PRE-APPROVED MORTGAGE: A commitment from a lender to provide a mortgage loan on stated terms to a borrower before the borrower has found a property to buy. The pre-approved mortgage allows the borrower to make a firm, cash offer on the property of choice.
PRE-QUALIFICATION: The act of going through the mortgage application process before the borrower is ready to borrow, to establish how much money the borrower could obtain under a loan.
