I WANT TO HELP MY MOM. ANY SUGGESTIONS?

[GLMRGIRL717]

My mom is a renter and I want to help her purchase a place.  She lives in Phoenix so there are cheap foreclosures everywhere.  According to most mortgage calculators, her mortgage would be less than 1/3 of what she pays in rent now for the properties we are interested in.  Now is really the time.  Where I run into complications is I don't want to have to purchase the house under my name.  My fiance and I are looking in to purchasing our own place in the next year or so and I want to be able to qualify for FHA for that.  My mother has NO credit, minus one last collection that I'm working on a PFD for.  How hard would it be for her to get an FHA?  I have good credit. Other than some high utilization, I've never had a single missed payment.  If I add her to one or two of my cards, would that help her?

[hawkeye33]

If her main issue is lack of credit history/current credit lines, then adding her as an authorized user on your cards should help pull her score up. How much depends on her current scores, among other factors. There are some good threads regarding authorized users on CCs over on the rebuiling and credit card forums. Do you know what her scores are now?

Once the scores are up over 620, she should be ok from that perspective. Then, your best way of helping her is probably to gift her money toward down payment and/or closing costs.

[rockymtngrl]

The first thing you should do is have her buy her scores from this site to see where she stands score wise. You also did'nt say anything about her income, what her source of income is or what price range house she is looking. All of that factors in.

Keep in mind when using mortgages calculators to figure a monthly payment, 99% of them don't take into consideration taxes, insurance, HOA or MIP/PMI which is also figured into the payment. So depending on the price range of house & local taxes you'll need to add probably min $250 per month to the payment up to $1000 a month or more.