One of the first steps to buying a home is to make sure that you are not only in a financial position to buy a home, but to also make sure that you have the credit history that will allow for you to be approved by your lender for a mortgage.

There are several ways to find out how you stand for your credit history and credit scoring.

My first recommendation would be to go right to your local lender ( could be the lender that carries your car loan) and let them know that you would like to find out what you can afford for a home purchase and that you wanted to know your credit score. They can sit with you and go over what they will need to see in terms of documents etc to run all of your numbers and see if you are in a financial position to buy a home. They may even be able to run a credit check that day and give you your credit scores and a full credit report.

The other option would be to open an account with Credit Karma.com . We did this years ago when we were recovering from some financial hardship and working on repairing our credit scores. It really is a great tool ( No, I am not being paid by Credit Karma.com to write this lol ) It will not only show you what your credit score is but it will show you any lines of credit that might be open in your name. VERY important to check every item here and make sure that all are accounts that you not only know about but are ones that you opened. We live in a time sadly where identity theft occurs so we should all be checking our credit history on a regular basis.

https://www.creditkarma.com/faq/howitworks

Once you have your score , this will give you a better idea of what mortgage programs you would be eligible for.

If your score is less than perfect, don’t panic. It is way better to know so that you can come up with a 1 or 2 year plan of repairing whatever you need to work on. Or, perhaps your score is ok but you want to improve it even more to get a better interest rate on your mortgage program. That is also worth waiting on.

Hoping this post was helpful and as always, reach out to me with questions !

Tanya

“ All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination”

-Earl Nightingale