I am currently writing this from my office on Thursday evening. I am waiting (not so) patiently to do our final walk through for our new house! Tomorrow, we close and Monday you’ll be reading this gem.

And I knew I had to write this post before all of the feelings of anxiety and frustration were overshadowed by the feelings of gratitude and excitement that come with becoming first time home owners.

Because like everything in this world, there are a few things that I wish someone would have told me about buying a house that I just didn’t know. Maybe these things are foolish or I should have Googled more, but even when I feel like it, none of my struggles have ever been completely unique to just me.

So, whether you are getting ready to start home shopping tomorrow or you know it’ll be a little later down the road until you buy a house, here are a few things I wish someone would have told me before I started this process.

Lenders use the lower credit score for joint applications.

I know a few couples who have decided, for a number of reasons, to have only one spouse apply for a mortgage. For some, it’s because one spouse’s salary alone qualifies for a home buying assistance program. For others, it’s because one person’s credit is in less than ideal shape and it just makes sense for the person with the strongest credit score to go it alone.

Shamar and I have a pretty healthy combined income and good credit so we decided apply jointly for our mortgage. I just assumed they would average our credit scores together when it came time to review them (hey, I didn’t know!) but that’s not how it works.

If applying for a mortgage jointly, you will each enter into your application with three scores. The lender will then throw out the high and low and leaving only the middle. They will then use the lower score of the two to determine both your credit worthiness and rate.

Shamar and I have always been really open about finances–but for folks who still manage their finances without the input of their spouse…ya’ll are going to want to have a good sit down long before you go to a bank. I’d hate for you to be giving your spouse the side eye for not disclosing their troubled credit across the table from a lender.

There are many levels to approval.

Throughout this process we got “Congratulations! You’ve been approved” emails and thought YES! MAMA, WE MADE IT! To only feel like my dawg Squidward later once we realized the “congrats” was for a completion of a step and not the completion of a process.

You should not confuse pre-qualification with pre-approval with conditional approval with being “cleared to close”–but you should celebrate each step. If I’m honest, I spent a lot of the mortgage application process frustrated (not by anyone in particular, our team was amazing) but by my own impatience.

I knew the house that we are buying (or bought by the time you read this) was ours the first time we walked into in March so I just wanted everyone to move at my pace and timeline–which wasn’t the case at all.

Underwriting is beast–you aren’t alone.

Our underwriter was scrupulous, boy.
And yours likely will be too.

You aren’t alone.

Our underwriter asked about everything, EVERYTHING. At one point, I had to write a letter of explanation (a letter to answer a question your underwriter asks you) about a poop test Luna had to have at the vet because it was over $100 and they thought it was a debt I hadn’t disclosed to them.

No ma’am, no debt, just a poop test for our puppy.

If it aint ya paycheck or your bills, leave it alone.

As we went through this process, I read so much about not moving tens of thousands of dollars into your bank account or buying rooms and rooms of furniture while you’re in underwriting.

So I didn’t do any of these things.

But we did other stuff that made our underwriting process longer.

Random deposits from our personal checking account to our joint account and bills that I paid for my mother made us have to explain to our underwriter where “extra” money was coming from and if suddenly we had bought a new car because of the extra car payments that popped up on our bank statements. In reality, I was just helping my mom out with her bills–but the lender saw additional debts and I had to prove they weren’t ours.

So hear me clearly, DON’T DO A THING during underwriting. It’s not enough to not charge thousands of dollars in new furniture or get thousands of dollars transferred into your bank account–don’t do anything that will signal to someone that you have taken on more debt or somehow are trying to be shady about getting funds for your closing costs.

And the crazy part is–we weren’t being shady! We were spending money, making transfers, and doing things that we do all the time–but even that can set off what feel like unnecessary alarms during underwriting.

God is concerned more about the condition of your heart than what’s in your hand.

God will never punk you out of the process. If He said it, it will come to pass. But it’s real easy to demand that God meets your timeline instead of trusting His.

I was nasty during this process. I won’t even lie. And I’m not proud of it. I wasn’t outwardly nasty (but I may have let a snarky email come out once or twice) but my heart was yucky.

I was irritable, impatient, and sometimes mean to Shamar.
It’s okay. I’ve since made up for it with ice cream and other things…

But all jokes aside, every time I got out of my own head and remembered the promises of God, suddenly an obstacle was removed from our process.

While there are plenty more things out there about the home buying process, these were the ones that Google wasn’t able to school me on during the home buying process.

There is magic in our musings,
Nicole