Buying A Home
jesspacatc
member
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Va mortgages
Anyone have one and willing to share their experiences.
Re: Va mortgages
Open-ended questions like this are hard to answer, so it's better if you post some specific questions you'd like answered.
We've used our VAs 3 times and refi'd using the streamline (IRRRL) refi twice.
1. The most important thing you can do for yourself is find a broker who's experienced with VA loans. Bc they're federal loans, they naturally come with a TON of extra paperwork and a loan processor who doesn't know what they're doing can totally screw you accidentally by missing deadlines and by not filing certain extra docs.
2. I've heard it said on here, but it has NOT been my experience re: the inspection being tougher than usual. That is true of FHA loans, but not VAs in our experience. Now, I've never tried to buy a falling down wreck with a VA, but the inspections have been standard ones without any extra criteria, hiccups, or delays to closing.
3. We've had the best luck with an independent mortgage broker (who shops multiple banks to find you the best loan) rather than going directly to a bank. We have all our financials with USAA and I believe they're the greatest bank in the universe. That said, we've contacted them every time for a mortgage/refi and their mortgage dept is just incompetent. They have no idea what they're doing, their rates are higher than any other bank we've spoken with at the time, and the delays are unreal. We actually got about 90% of the way done on a refi with them last year and threw our hands up in exasperation and walked away from them. I'm FB friends with our mortgage broker and she posted a few weeks ago, "Thank you, USAA, for your mortgage department being so awful. I get so many of your disgruntled customers that you've paid for our new in-ground pool."
4. If you're not in a military area, some sellers may refuse to accept a VA loan, believing that you have financial issues (they're confusing it with gov't programs). Make sure your agent understands VA loans too to address any of those concerns that may come up.
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Thinking of doing cosmetic updates to a dated home? These were our costs.
Pretty much ditto everything the PP said. We used a VA loan with 0 down payment to pay for our new home back in October. Everything went smoothly for us, including the inspection. I had been most nervous about that part since I had read that they could be pretty stringent, but they missed a lot of minor things that our regular home inspector found and we fixed them on our own time.
I also second avoiding USAA- we initially tried to go through them because we thought that they would be the most experienced. However, dealing with their mortgage department was very frustrating. We eventually learned that they would not be able to meet the closing date we had agreed to, so we got a recommendation from our lawyer for a local lender experienced with VA loans. They were great and got everything done on time.
My biggest advice would be to just research, research, research. This board is a great resource- if you have any specific questions I would also recommend trying the Military Nesties board. There were a lot of things I learned on my own through calling different lenders, reading websites, and taking books out of the library. If I hadn't done that, I would have never known that we were exempt from the funding fee and that would have been a lot of money out of our pocket for no reason.
Good luck!