Dan Hubrich of Castle & Cooke Mortgage is back with some tips on getting into your own home sooner rather than later. I trust Dan to handle my clients’ as well as my own loans. He knows his stuff!

Do you have a goal to buy your first home this year? Or would you like to upgrade your current home but don’t want a higher payment? Here’s a strategy that a lot of our clients have been using with great success! Zero down home financing has been around for quite a while BUT it used to be very hard to qualify. You had to have a high credit score, be a first time buyer, and have limited income. That is no longer the case! Most people will qualify now and you don’t have to be a first time buyer. A 620 is the minimum now which is much lower than before, and if you have a 700 credit score we can even get you a zero down loan with NO mortgage insurance! There are still income limits but they are much more liberal now and very few people are over the limit.

Because of that there is no reason not to buy right now. The rental market in Utah is going crazy so rents will continue to go up. Do you want to decide what your house payment is or do you want someone else to? Another way to look at it is this…if you’re afraid to get into a mortgage, you should know that you’re already paying a mortgage! It’s just someone else’s mortgage!

If you own a home now and want to upgrade but don’t want your payment to change, here is something to think about that can allow you to have your cake and eat it too! A lot of our clients are selling their current home and then rather than putting a bigger down payment on the new home, they are putting less money down but paying off ALL of their other debts! We just did a deal where the client had $36,000 in misc debts (Car loan, credit cards, student loans, etc.) The total payments on all of those debts were $984/month. By paying those off, it allowed them to buy an additional $178,000 in house! So imagine going from a $300,000 home to a $478,000 home all for the same total payment that you’re already used to shelling out each month?!! That’s the power of using some debt strategies in conjunction with a low/no down payment loan.

We’d love to chat and see if something like this may work for you. Call us anytime with any questions!