• The value of sitting down with a mortgage professional

  • By SERGIO ANGELES

    Let’s pick up where we left off at the end of last month’s article shall we?
    My realtor friends, who are absolute pros, loved it! Some other realtors, not so much; in an effort to turn the other side into really believing the value of sitting down with a mortgage professional first, let me give you something to chew on.
    Income planning. Qualifying on a home loan is a little trickier than you might think. Let me “esplain” (I grew up watching “I Love Lucy”). Let’s say you’ve been at your job for 20 years and you’re still renting your co-worker’s garage. Let’s further say that your company has been asking you to work overtime and double time and you have politely declined the offer over the past few years, hey! Not having to work so much is the benefit of living in a garage. But then the unthinkable happens. You get a serious girlfriend who refuses to be sweet on you inside of a garage. You start working all the overtime and double time and even triple time (this could be a local policeman) that you can get your hands on. This is where the sins of the past come to haunt you. The bank will only count overtime if you worked it for two years continually, it doesn’t matter that it’s always been there for you.
    Thinking you can afford more in the moment is an easy pitfall to fall into, I can help you avoid such an embarrassment by letting you know what you actually qualify for and not what you figured you did.
    One more, these are fun!
    Let’s say you and your husband (notice the gender reversal) finally want to settle down and have a little piece of homestead that you guys can call your own. Well, your husband, the fantastic bread winner that he is, has made it so you didn’t have to work much, until now! You panic because you feel guilty that you’ve been working at Café Ella serving up latte’s and having some seriously fun conversations instead of working with that degree you got in accounting. So you call me and I will calm you down and esplain (big Ricky Ricardo fan) that if you could find a stable accounting job now that paid you a salary then I can esplain to the bank that your degree along with your years of accounting at the register at Café Ella has been your job history and going forward you will now be “arning” more than $10.50 an hour. Happy days! You guys now qualify for more which means you don’t have to settle for the one bedroom one bath condo that your husband was already starting to make sense of.
    You are now free to shop all realtors until you find the one that loves my articles.

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