On Tuesday, March 6 we had our first meeting with a real live human being of a banker. I know! No phone interviews, non-informative websites or anything. A real banker!
Our first meeting was with SunTrust bank. Jason and I went there in the late afternoon after I got off of work. We met with a very nice gentleman.
The first words out of his mouth were “So, what kind of property are you looking at?” Our response: Well ummm….we haven’t looked yet, hence the reason we’re at the bank. Is it just me or is this a chicken or the egg sort of scenario? Should we get approved for the money first or should we find the house first? In fact, neither Jason nor I had ever even heard of people going out and seriously looking at homes without first knowing how much they could afford. Mind you, we all eye homes when we start thinking about looking for a house, but I’m not going to go look in a trailer park or the multi-million dollar subdivision if I don’t know where I stand. Thank you very much.
Ok…now that my tangent is over…moving on: We came out of the meeting knowing this:
#1: we were in the great financial situation that we thought we were in.
#2: we qualified for 2 different types of loans, both were great for first time home buyers. The first was an FHA loan which requires 3% down and has a 3% interest rate. The other was a USDA loan for rural development. It requires no money down and has a 3.75%-4% interest rate. The thing about the USDA loan is that it you can’t buy a home within city limits. No biggie for us, being in the city is half the reason we’re moving anyways.
#3: Buying a home that is under foreclosure is more than acceptable for either loan. HOWEVER, as we continued to dig and you know... nonchalantly mentioned the home with the tarp on the roof we learned that the USDA lenders like homes to be move-in ready. A little carpet or paint wasn’t a big deal; roof damage was a much bigger deal.
Okay….so let me hear the collective won-wah! You know the voice, when you’re really disappointed, you hear that voice. What’s more, is that Jason had been kind of bringing up this house on more than one occasion and may have already had his heart set on it. I think I was more disappointed for him about that particular house than anything else.
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But ultimately, the meeting with the SunTrust counselor went very very well. He told us that if we wanted, we could theoretically afford $1700 a month in mortgage. Now…that is waaaaayyyy out of the picture. We’d like to live in a nice house, but we’d also like to live. Paying $1700 a month in mortgage would require Jason putting down the deer rifles and us watching the movies in our collection every night from start to finish about 18,000 times because we wouldn’t be able to afford to do anything else. Not to mention, ever get married. NO WAY JOSE! But it was nice to know that the banks thought of us in such a way.
So we left after 30 minutes of being told very good news and decided to celebrate the good news with a beer and fries at Christo’s. Go us!
The only thing that we didn’t find out, what is our dagum price range? We still needed to be pre-qualified as a couple instead of just me and my Lending Tree paper. So while at Christo’s, we decided that while at Wednesday’s meeting, we would bite the bullet and let Citizen’s South check our credit.
Here’s to knowing that we’re theoretically richer than we actually are! Yahoo!
Love as always,
Meredith
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