@Anonymous wrote:Aha, excellent. This makes sense. It's more than likely gonna be 3 years. Two more years of school and then a year to let things stabilize. Although, I'm sure mortgage companies won't like my $300k in student loans >_< I was browsing the student loan section too and will look more into that later.
Well that brings up another point, student loan consolidation/refinance, and home mortgages, is this a big issue to happen close to each other?
As austin said, the primary factor for you on the mortgage is going to be debt-to-income ratio since you already have excellent credit. Are you paying on the loans now or are they being deferred? Do you have the majority of that already or is that the total you will have by the time you finish your current degree? Personally, I think it would be wise to refinance the student loans prior to getting the mortgage if at all possible, especially if they are private rather than federal loans. Even a 1% difference with loans that large would mean hundreds of dollars in monthly obligations gone - that would be far more beneficial than taking a slight ding for a single new installment account.
+1 on the Costco card if that makes sense for your spend, although you would want to use your Freedom and Dividend cards for the 5% back when available for wholesale clubs in any quarter. The sting from a new account starts to go away at 3-6 months and is pretty much gone by 2 years for most people (an exception might be you have one card that is ten years old and you were just getting a second card - that would immediately make a drastic change in your average age of accounts).
