RachelRachel wrote:
Hi NeedsHelp23,
My name is Rachel. This forum was a huge help to me so I hope I can be of help to you. I am a NACA success story and closed on my home purchase on 5/27/10. I also had some renovations/wish list stuff done thru the HAND program, those were done after closing. It sounds like you will be ready for NACA UW soon and then get your pre-approval letter so you can start shopping, but I can't remember how long that took, a lot of what happened is a little fuzzy sorry. But, hopefully, someone else will chime in about that.
As for the repairs, NACA doesn't help with costs, the costs come out of whatever your loan amount is. The Seller could help, but that would have to be negotiated into your purchase contract with them. I don't know if this is making sense so I'll try to explain how it worked for us:
We entered into contract with seller and I think we had a 45 day closing. We had home inspection. HAND reviewed inspectors report and let us know which items had to be resolved. If Seller makes the repairs, inspector will need to come back and submit another report to HAND so they can determine if all is clear. We had large things to fix, plus wish list items, as well as some small things but we chose to have contractor do all the repairs after closing so as not to delay the process. You can't do the loan application and get to the Bank Underwriter until all the repair/improvement costs are determined since these will be part of the loan amount requested. Our purchase price was $225,000. Our loan amount ended up being $258,000. Our closing ended up going past the 45 days so my advice would be to do your bank application as soon as you can then keep following up with MC till bank underwriter approves you because you can't close until that happens. All of the closing costs should be paid by bank but that doesn't include cost of home inspection. We took out a loan on my 401K to get money to buy down rate and our rate which ended up being 2.188%. The buydown money has to be available before loan is submitted to bank underwriter. Hopefully, someone can chime in with a program that can give you money you can apply toward buydown.
Hope that helps. Best wishes to you!!
~Rachel
Rachel, thank you so much for your guidance and congratulations as a success story. Your response is just what I needed to give me a guideline of what to expect. I've frequented the NACA forums, but found this board to be much more informative.
It's good to know that if repairs/applicances, etc are needed, we can include them in our loan payment. The plan right now is to save as much as possible and at least buydown a quarter percent. At this time the NACA rate is 3.75% which is still a good deal. I will update my status periodically and hope to be able to say in a few month . . . WE'VE CLOSED!!!
Thank you again!
