What Not To Do When Buying A Home

WHAT NOT TO DO WHEN BUYING A HOME

All right. So you’ve put an offer on a house, it’s been accepted. You’re moving through the home inspection phase, and then they’re going to sign the perch and sale. Here are just a couple quick things, and you probably already know it, and you’re probably going to laugh about it, but we’re going to say it anyway. Here’s a couple quick things not to do during your home buying process, during that 30, 45, 60 days between when you’ve signed your agreement, to when you close, okay.

You obviously don’t want to change jobs, right? You don’t want to buy a new car or trade your car, because your approval is based on your debt to income. If you change your car payment either plus or minus, it’s going to produce some credit inquiries, probably several, which are going to affect your credit score. All right, don’t use your credit cards outside of your normal use. Again, your approval is based on your debt to income ratio. The credit card balances go up, that affects your debt to income what they call the DTI.

And then of course your pre-approval could be affected on that, okay. Don’t open new credit cards. Again, a credit inquiry, potential incurred debt, you don’t want to do that. Don’t buy furniture or appliances which is a big one on credit, right? You certainly don’t want to put a contract on the house, then go up and run out some credit card debt. Because you’re going to buy your refrigerator and your couch for your new house, you don’t want to do that. Don’t make radical changes in your bank accounts, right? Don’t change your banks, don’t move around.

Don’t pull a bunch of money out, you have to submit your bank statements and probably 30, 60 days of banking history to make sure you don’t have any bounce checks and things like that. So you don’t want some erratic type of money in or out of there. Or if you’re getting a financial gift, check with your loan officer first. Make sure how the gift should come in, how it should be titled, how we track it to support a gift letter, all right? Don’t cosign for anybody. Might seem simple, let me help my sister get a car real quick. That debt becomes your debt, that inquiry becomes your inquiry and will affect your credit cards, okay.

And here’s a really tricky one, don’t upgrade your cell phone. Your cell phone will turn around and give you a credit inquiry, and we don’t want to do that. We want to not do, we want to do our best to not touch our credit in any way in the 30, 45, 60 days between the time you purchased your house, you put a contract on your house and when you close. Because towards the end of the loan, after the commitment, a couple days before they’re going to do that final verification on your job, do that quick service little credit check to make sure that you haven’t changed your credit status between when they approved you, and when you close.

So you want to make sure that you don’t kind of hit these things, all right. A kind of common sense, but certainly helps to put it out there. @WokwithEvan on twitter feed, EvanandtheRussellteam.com under my email, Russell realty minute. I hope you have a great day, thanks for dialing in.