Buying a Home
Our Home Buying Journey
What are we doing? What were we looking for? Can we afford it?
Ya'll. Buying a home right now seems impossible. There are no homes under 400k. I thought I found some great homes under 400k! The pictures are beautiful, there is no HOA, it is brand new and comes with all the appliances, and isn't that far from work. I drove down to see these beautiful homes, and once I got there it was very clear this was too good to be true. You guessed it, it is a 55+ Community. Good job Renee! Treated myself to a coffee and went home.
Getting a Loan
I went to my bank and talked to a Mortgage Advisor about how the loan process works. She had some great information on what exactly I could afford based on my down payment amount, the mortgage rates, and loan amount. She went over the different types of home loans that there are as well.
Update!
So I was going through this process with my credit union, but the person that was helping me got laid off! I was kind of in shock. This is going to be the largest purchase of our life and we lost the preson who was supposed to be helping us. I reached out to her boss and asked what was going on, and they assigned a new guy to help us with this. Okay, no problem I thought. I set up a phone call with the new loan advisor and started asking him questions on our application to see how much we qualified for and how much our APR would be with different down payment amounts. He was awful. He did not give me and answer with numbers, everything was "They are about the same." I quickly sent an email and let them know I was going to be using a different bank for my loan.
So off to Chase I went. They have been sending me preapproval letters for home loans for years now, I should have just gone there first. I submitted a request through my Chase app and heard back almost right away. The woman that called me and talked to me was so helpful and informative. She did have some bad news though. There is this new law in California, if you go from a salaried position to an hourly position you have to have that hourly position for 12 months to be qualified for a home loan. I have been hourly for over a year now, but Timmy has only been hourly for 3 months. We have to wait 9 more months to be qualified, or one of us become salaried again. Needless to say, I was very upset when I found this out. The Chase advisor sent me a lot of information about the home loan process and wants to help us once that time comes though, so I am very thankful for that. It is just so frustrating that we make enough money to pay the loan, but do not qualify because of this new law.