Buying A Home
Jdunk2008
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 Loan
Anyone have any information or recent experience with the VA loan? We are at the very, very beginning of home buying. As in saving up for at least another 18 months! But I'm just curious to learn more about some of the ins and outs. I have read a few places online and it seems pretty kosher. Thanks!
Re: VA Loan
My husband and I are in the middle of the VA loan process. We originally started out with a conventional loan, but changed to a VA loan because PMI disappeared and we had a lower interest rate. In turn, we were able to purchase a bigger house because of the VA loan. We are also saving almost $200 a month on our mortgage. The more money you have for a down payment the lower the one-time fee is. Usually it's over 3% of the cost of the house, but because we had a decent down payment, we are only paying 1.25% of the purchase price.
Typically, a VA loan takes longer to "process" than a conventional. We put in our bid on May 4th, offer accepted May 11th (there were 6 other offers on our house), and we received our commitment letter today (5/30). You can go to any bank to get a VA loan. We went with the people that had an underwriter in house, which I highly recommend because we were able to get everything done A LOT faster. Both agents were surprised that the process was SO fast. There is already a SOLD sign on the house and we don't move into the house until August 1st.
While we've heard horror stories about securing a VA loan, ours was easy. The biggest difference, from what we can tell is that the appraiser must be VA approved.As long as the house is safe and there are no major issues, the appraiser will approve it. Also, we told our agent that if something didn't "pass" with the VA we would go in a fix it, so that we could use the VA loan.
Be forewarned that sellers may be skittish when they see a VA loan. There is nothing preventing you from starting out with a conventional loan and then switching to a VA loan once the structural/pest inspection is done. That's what we did. The seller just has to sign off on it.
Good luck with the house hunting. The VA stuff is more work, but totally worth it and the way we look at it is that my husband spent 4 1/2 years active duty in the Army he should be able to use the benefits of the VA loan.