Mortgage Resources 201:

More than just a website - awfully close to a textbook!

 

Psychologists tell us that fear of the unknown is actually the root of people's worst fears.

We'll try to alleviate your real estate and mortgage fears by explaining WHO does WHAT to WHOM & WHY. This will not replace personal contact and help, but it will answer a lot of the more common questions and give you a resource that can be utilized at any time of the day or night.

 

It will take several hours to go thru the complete course.

It is not quite a textbook (yet), but there is a lot of reading. If you persevere you will gain information and benefits you cannot get elsewhere. It may be long, but it will never be bland. There's a lot more to buying &/or selling a home than you may have thought. It's not hard but there are many, many aspects that need to be thought about and planned for plus many things you can do to improve your situation - if you begin early enough.

 

Because you don't need a home loan often, buying or selling tends to be a little scary.

As you might expect home loans are much more detailed than a car or credit card loan, but with help and careful planning, the loan process does not have to be an ulcer causing uncertainty.

It is very important to you that someone involved in the transaction understand all the legal and procedural steps (that's us) plus the nuances required for a successful and satisfactory closing. We have over 70 years of real estate, title, and appraisal experience on our staff and if FINANCIER$ is doing your purchase financing we can legally offer free help with contracts, paperwork, offers/counter offers, time frames, etc. We can even give you hints on how to work best with Builders, Realtors & For Sale By Owners (FSBO - pronounced FIZZ- BO).

It is also very important you have someone doing the financing that you can trust and ask questions of. You want someone that you can count on to be impartial and give unbiased answers.

Unlike a Builder's mortgage company & Title company who both work for the Builder and have THE BUILDER'S best interests at heart, FINANCIER$ will put your interests above the Seller's. Buying/Selling is not rocket science, but there are many places for misunderstandings to develop and definite steps that must be taken to ensure adequate title transfer & understanding by all parties. (see also About Us)

We're going to teach you all the "little" things you need to know to be able to make an intelligent and non-stressful decision about houses, neighborhoods and loan types.

Yes, we must go much further than just financing because you can't separate finding a home from financing a home. You will find they are inextricably intertwined and you are going to be amazed at how differently things can work out than you might have imagined.

Before you begin your journey let me share with you a real life example from our family's recent house hunting expeditions that illustrates how intertwined the 2 are. Keep in mind as you read this that we own a mortgage company and have been Real Estate Brokers since 1974 so, in theory, we shouldn't have had issues like this. What would you have done in the same situation?

Like most people, we looked at a map & picked areas we thought fit our needs and then drove the areas. Once we'd narrowed it down we looked at homes thru the Realtor MLS system & also looked at all FSBOs (which is a very typical scenario according to our customers). 

We thought we knew how much home loan we could afford (which should be the first step in your journey as well) but that didn't actually turn out to be the case.

Our affordability presumption was based upon a "guesstimated" total monthly payment that included Principle-Interest-Taxes & Insurances.  You always use a TOTAL monthly payment since that is the amount you must qualify for even if you are paying your own taxes and insurance. We knew interest rates, we knew approximate insurance rates and we used middle of the road tax estimates - which turned out to be a problem.

FYI: The qualification payment must also include mortgage insurance and Home Owners Association dues.

After shopping around we found a house that fit our needs and wrote a contract. In Texas you can write an Option contract that gives you X number of days to research the property or have it inspected (both activities I'd HIGHLY recommend). To make a long story short, we got bit on all fronts. The inspection showed the house needed over $40,000 worth of work, the Taxes were over twice what we had guesstimated (which raised the house payments over $500 a month!) and to top it all off the house didn't appraise for the contract price.

Obviously you wouldn't want to buy a house that needed $40,000 worth of work unless the price reflected the condition and you had the money to do the work, but not so obvious is the damage the higher taxes did. Let's forget for the moment that our house payment was going to be $500 a month more than we'd budgeted and focus on the qualification aspect. At that time the $500 a month extra payment cut the amount of loan we could qualify for by $58,459.  OOPS!   

Now a word on the appraisal. Never let anyone try to convince you that an appraisal doesn't matter. It does! The state Tax Assessment value doesn't matter but a REAL appraisal does.

Now let me explain, the MORTGAGE appraisal is for your protection. A MORTGAGE appraisal is an accurate representation of what the property is really worth. As you can guess by the way I emphasized the word MORTGAGE, there are different types of appraisals. You'll learn these differences in the Appraisal section.

The moral of this part of the story is to do your homework and to always make your contract contingent upon the house appraising for at least sales price. You thought that was part of the contract? Not anymore, that protection has been removed from the state promulgated contracts. We knew enough to add it. Before reading this would you?

This "little set back" didn't totally discourage us as we knew enough to know we weren't stuck with this property or situation so after this wake up call we did a little more research and ended up changing areas, slightly, and saved ourselves about $100,000. We got a LOT more home for the money in the new area, taxes were less than half those of the old area which meant we could buy a larger home and still keep our payments the same PLUS the new house appraised for MORE THAN the selling price.

Hopefully, after going through this site you will also have the knowledge to know your options and be able to make intelligent decisions.

FINANCIER$ knows the ins & outs of the real estate process so you don't have to.

 

If you don't find the information you are looking for don't hesitate to call or email!

OK, now that you've read 2 pages I'd like to ask you if you like the type size I'm using?  The "experts" say this is THE size to use but I feel it is a little small. Is this better? FYI: Most browsers allow you make all the type bigger or samller in the pull down menus. If you have any suggestions that would make our site easier to use or read please hit the Contact Us button at the bottom of the page and tell us. We listen!