When you’re getting ready to buy a house, your lender will want to see your credit score, a three-digit number that represents how well you pay back debt. Before you apply for a mortgage, keep in mind that your…
What is a Mortgage Payment? At a basic level, you know the definition of a mortgage payment: the amount of money you pay toward your mortgage each month. But you may be wondering, what exactly is included in a…
Getting a mortgage may seem like a complex task with many layers and steps involved. However, the first step to breaking down the process involves answering the most basic question: “What is a mortgage?” Understanding the very basics of…
How Much House Can I Afford? It’s often easiest to learn how much house you can afford by working backward from your monthly expenses, then determining how much you can afford to pay. In other words, add up your…
Plenty of individuals depend on tips to support some or all of their earnings. This trend is especially prominent in the service and hospitality sectors, where millions of Americans work and rely on gratuities as a significant part of…
The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates three times in 2018, and they’re not finished: another hike is expected before the end of the year. If that’s not bad enough, most financial analysts agree that we can look forward…
Credit scores are a fact of life for Americans in the 21st-century, but credit scores haven’t always existed. Without credit scores, lenders might still be relying on handshakes and other subjective measures to determine credit-worthiness. Doing so would leave…
So, you’ve found a person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life. When you met, it was like you’d known each other forever. And now, the two of you want to buy a home and…
Maybe your credit history isn’t exactly stellar. Sure, you’d like to be a homeowner one day—maybe even one day soon. But that recent run of bad luck and/or bad decisions showing up on your credit report doesn’t put you…
Your credit score may never be more important than it is when you’re applying for a mortgage. It’s not easy to raise your credit score dramatically in a short period of time. But it is easy to inadvertently lower…
Errors on credit reports are surprisingly common. A few years ago, the Federal Trade Commission completed a decade-long study which found that more than 20% of consumers had at least one error on a credit report significant enough to…
Balancing any household budget can be a juggling act. Adding a mortgage loan on top of everything else can make it seem almost impossible. In fact, Millennials have put off big investments like purchasing a home, often citing the…
Before a lender offers you a loan or line of credit, that lender wants to know the answer to one very important question: If I loan money to this person, how likely is it that this person will pay…
As a first-time homeowner, you may not know is exactly when in the home buying process you should tackle the mortgage question. Too many homebuyers wait to worry about home financing until they’re knee-deep in negotiations on their dream…
Maybe you’ve heard horror stories about mortgages gone wrong—particularly when mortgages don’t close quickly. Homebuyers stuck in living-in-a-hotel-limbo because they underestimated the length of time it would take to finalize their mortgage. The seller who backed out of a…
The house-hunting shows on television make it look so simple: decide to buy a home. Stroll through a few open houses, fall in love with the perfect place, sign some papers, and pop open the champagne. Congratulations, you’re now…
Homeownership is a dream-come-true for many Americans. But as home-owning friends and colleagues will readily tell you, navigating the potential pitfalls of mortgages and homeownership can be difficult. Many homeowners and would-be homebuyers have their home-owning dreams dashed because they…
This post is by MyBankTracker. MyBankTracker compares banks and financial products to help you find the best financial products for your lifestyle. I’ve been writing about debt for a long time – almost five years, in fact. That, mixed…
This post is brought to you by our friends at My BankTracker. Home ownership is one of those things that everyone thinks about sometimes. We all assume it will happen one day. We vaguely save money or think about…