What You Can Do To Get a Bad Credit Mortgage
Posted in Mortgages on August 20th, 2010 by Jim – Comments OffMany people are trying to take advantage of the great prices in housing right now. You could be one of them, even if you have bad credit. While lenders are more reluctant to write a sub-prime or bad credit mortgage, they can happen under the right circumstances. What can you do to get one of these mortgages? Read on.
There are really three things to consider: your FICO score, your debt-to-income ratio and your down payment nest egg. These three things play off each other in different ways depending on the values of each part. If you have a high FICO but a high DTI (debt-to-income), you may be just fine. Or if your FICO is in the 500s but you have a sizable down payment, that might be just fine, as well. The thing to worry about is having a bad FICO, a high DTI and little to no down payment. You will not qualify for a mortgage, not even with bad credit mortgage rates, with all three of those against you.
To get a bad credit mortgage loan or a bad credit refinancing package, you need to work on your credit score, first and foremost. This is the key to how the lenders view you and your request. You can do a lot to improve your score and you don’t need to pay a service to for that either! These days everyone is trying to make money by helping you improve your credit score. Ignore those ads and do the work yourself. It is not hard. First, request a copy of your score, if you don’t have that information already. Look for any old lines of credit. Do you still have that Shell gas card? If not, you can write to the credit bureau and request that the account be marked closed by consumer. It is important to make sure it is not marked closed by the company. That would be a huge black mark on your score.
Next, the lenders look at how much debt you have when compared to your income. If you carry too much debt, the lenders will be reluctant to loan to you, for free that you will default. Pay off as much debt as you can, before you apply for a bad credit mortgage. Even if it is small debt, having less debts listed on the lender report is a good thing.
Last, if you do not have any sort of down payment ready, don’t waste your time. These days, no matter your credit score, you have got to have a down payment in order to buy a house. That would sound odd to our grandparents who knew that a down payment was required for a mortgage, but in the last two decades, those rules went out the window. Now they are back and to stay, most likely. So you need 20% of the loan’s value as your down payment. Accept it and move on. House prices and interest rates are likely to be good and low for a few more years, so focus on saving for a down payment and cleaning up your FICO.