Hi there - We had been waiting to do the BTW story since last year when it was announced. I called various lenders starting in September/October 2013 and no one in my area was very familar and they were not doing (Eastern Iowa/Western Illinois). Our 12 months from discharge wouldn't arrive until January 2014 so we had time to wait - we were just trying to get prepared to see what would be required for the program.
Finally in December we got the name of a company who was doing the program in our area so we reached out to them and she confirmed that they were doing so to call them in January. I mainly had to educate them a lot on the program from what I found online and with the FHA guidelines - for example they didn't realize that I had to wait 30 days after taking the counseling class. We took the class on February 7th and then approached them to apply on March 7th, 2014.
SO far - this has been the longest process of my LIFE. We asked them to underwrite a TBD address so we wouldn't have an offer out and then be denied later. Our original credit pull was on 3/13 and they asked us to remove some dispute comments and then some of our balances were not reporting as zero yet on accounts. Once we did that and things were reporting correctly they repulled on 4/1/2014 and submitted our application. Both my husband and I had middle scores of above 640 - my husband was only 642 but still made the hurdle. Our file went to the processor on 4/5 and on 4/8 it went to underwriting. It was supposed to take 10 business days for underwriting to review and render a decision.
It took WAY longer and the original underwriter denied us because we had too many new/open accounts in the past 12 months. Most of those were originally opened in February/March and July 2013 and had zero balances. NFCU did grant us a LOC 12/31/2013 which was the last thing we got. Our loan officer felt like that was not a good response so they sent us to the level 2 underwriter for review. Not sure who finally approved it - but last week we were told our file was APPROVED and that was on 5/15/2014.
We are now waiting on our conditional approval letter - which I am expecting to take a few more days since our loan officer is out this week. On Saturday she called and said all they needed was 12 months of cancelled rent checks in order to issue the preapproval letter. I sent those over on Saturday. She said so far there is no other requests other VOE that the processor will do on her own again - although I know they did this once already. I have provided income tax returns all the way back to 2006.
We are using the BTW program because I lost my job in 2007 and was unemployed from February 2007-May 2007 and then took a contingent job working part time hours for a few months until the company I was working at hired me full time in 2008. During that time we used our credit cards heavily (dumb I know) as a temporary solution thinking things would turn around. We did credit counseling first then because of the amounts we owed many companies would not agree to the credit counseling plan - so we ended up first with a ch13 bk and then eventually converted it to a ch7 in October 2012 with discharge January 2013.
I am feeling like it may just take us until January 2015 at this point (which would be the 2 year mark anyway) but at least I feel empowered to be doing something 
Let me know if you have any other questions.
