Something that I hear pretty commonly from people that are wanting to purchase a home is "I don't know what to do first, or I don't know what to do next."
Maybe purchasing a home is something that's in the near future, maybe the next three months, or maybe it's on a longer timeline six or 12 months. There are two easy things that you can do to put yourself in a good position.
The first is understand your credit:
When you speak with a mortgage lender, like me, one of the things that we'll do as a part of that application is pull your credit report. I will be able to discuss that report with you let you know what's on it, your scores and how that affects your loan in your terms. It gives you a really good starting point to understand what's going into some of that approval. If you don't necessarily want to take that step yet, you can go to annualcreditreport.com and every year for free, you can pull your report from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, once per year. While it doesn't give you the score, it does give you the full report so you can see what's on there, and then also handle anything that maybe isn't correct.
The second thing is thinking about your monthly payment:
If you are paying, let's say $1200 for rent right now, and that's comfortable, and you think that you can maybe handle somewhere around $1500 to 1700 for a mortgage payment, start putting that little difference aside every month. It will help you build up reserves for your down payment and closing costs or any other expenses that you might have going along with buying a home and it also gives your budget the chance to really get comfortable with making that payment.
These are two easy things to do to get you in a position to buy if you have any questions. I'm Rebecca with Wyndham Capital and I would love to help.