A good place to start is determining what your housing needs are and setting a budget. Where do you want to live? Are you buying or building? Does the home require a rehab or renovaton? You should also consider what type of mortgage you are looking for and the associated costs.
It is important to know what you can afford even before you start looking at homes. Using our simple mortgage calculator or discussing your financial situation with one of our Mortgage Loan Officers, is a good place to start. What a more conservative monthly mortgage payment, you will have room in your budget to cover the additional costs of homeownership such as repairs and maintenance.
While down payment requirements vary with each loan product, down payments of less than 20% require you to pay private mortgage insurance (PMI). PMI is an extra cost added to your monthly mortgage payment.
Each customer and loan are unique, however, you can typically expect to provide documents that verify your employment, income and assets, residence history, debt history and more.
A quick conversation with your Mortgage Loan Officer about your income, assets and down payment is enough to get prequalified, but if you want to get preapproved, we will need to verify your financial information and submit your loan for preliminary underwriting. A preapproval takes more time and documentation but can help move the home purchasing process along.
Mortgage points or discount points, are a way to prepay interest to get a lower interest rate (and monthly payment) on your mortgage. One discount point equals 1% of the loan amount. That means if you are getting a $250,000 loan and have two discount points, you will pay $5,000.
Typically, your monthly mortgage payment will include payment towards; principal, interest, homeowners insurance, property taxes and PMI, if you put less than 20% down