Getting A Good Interest Rate
All mortgages are not created the same. This is a lesson I learned the hard way. Matter of fact, I learn most lessons the hard way. I learned this lesson because I wanted to keep up with the proverbial Jone's. I wanted to keep up with the crowd and buy a house and a new care and all the material things that young couples are 'suppose' to have. Truthfully, we shouldn't have had any of these things and the people who we were trying to keep up with also shouldn't have had many of these things. Matter of fact, some of them later had their home foreclosed on. All that glitters isn't gold. We bought our house at the height of the real estate boom cycle. We were given a high interest loan with a high monthly mortgage note that we struggled to pay each month.
If we had only known about the value of a low interest rate. In all honestly, we were not good candidates for a home. We were a very young couple with a lot of debt and okay paying jobs. No one today would have given us a loan but those were the days where anyone with a pulse could qualify for a mortgage loan so under those requirements we qualified for a home loan. When you combine our debt with our mortgage buying this home put a lot of strain on us. We had the type of talk that most people have when they are buying something they really couldn't afford. We made plans to cut back on all types of things and we gave ourselves the pep talk about owning versus renting which truthfully is a poor argument because at the time renting was the smarter thing for us to do.
One thing that we did learn is that you must pay attention to your interest rate. Our hight interest rate was killing us. We were paying an extra $300 per month versus what someone with a low interest loan would have to pay. That money could have gone towards paying down our student loans or paying off the car.
I do not write this to scare you away from buying a house but to suggest that you make a good decision. Also, you need to protect your credit score so that you can qualify for a low interest mortgage.
If we had only known about the value of a low interest rate. In all honestly, we were not good candidates for a home. We were a very young couple with a lot of debt and okay paying jobs. No one today would have given us a loan but those were the days where anyone with a pulse could qualify for a mortgage loan so under those requirements we qualified for a home loan. When you combine our debt with our mortgage buying this home put a lot of strain on us. We had the type of talk that most people have when they are buying something they really couldn't afford. We made plans to cut back on all types of things and we gave ourselves the pep talk about owning versus renting which truthfully is a poor argument because at the time renting was the smarter thing for us to do.
One thing that we did learn is that you must pay attention to your interest rate. Our hight interest rate was killing us. We were paying an extra $300 per month versus what someone with a low interest loan would have to pay. That money could have gone towards paying down our student loans or paying off the car.
I do not write this to scare you away from buying a house but to suggest that you make a good decision. Also, you need to protect your credit score so that you can qualify for a low interest mortgage.