Take Shane's advice and I will amplify a little. Shane knows the particulars of our VA experience and hopefully we'll get the final approval we need Tuesday, but here is what I found. (Shane is unfortunately not our lender on this transaction 
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- Many lender's and brokers SAY they know how to do a VA loan. If it is pure vanilla with paychecks, good credit scores etc. they can and do get the job done with minimal effort on your part.
- If you have anything at all that is not pure straightforward etc. then you need to do a few things:
- Read the VA underwriting guidelines -- they are available on the internet
- Understand where the questions will occur and be ready with the information, as an example VA doesn't require a credit score at all if the applicant can prove capacity and willingness to honor obligations. A credit score is the lazy way of determining that so the lender's rely on the score. As Shane pointed out, the guy you talked to just spouted a number -- likely because he didn't want to be bothered to do some work (see below)
- Be ready to point out errors, fix discrepancies and push back. Also keep pushing things forward, if I had not stayed on top of the process and corrected errors along the way we would never be to this point. In fact one error they made on the first day, took until the file had been in their office 60 days to finally get corrected. This after numerous emails, phone calls etc. I made them give me a printout from Desktop Underwriter so I could make sure the data had been input correctly.
- Don't let anyone run a credit report until you have interviewed them and established they know what they are doing. Ask pointed questions that you have developed from step 1.
- Unlilke a regular loan a VA Loan is your Right, you earned it. Find a lender that will treat it that way not like they are doing you a favor taking your application.
@Brandytab wrote:We are looking at a home and are able to buy with VA. My income isn't being used, so it's based on husband's credit/income. Discharged ch13 BK (BK was 5 years ago, payments made on time) and the broker had zero concerns about that given the fact that it was 5 years ago. Nothing bad since then, good payment/rental/job history and can qualify for max VA.
All of that said - we were told that he needs a minimum 660 from the broker to get a VA loan. Is this typical? I thought it was closer to 620, and mid-score is 649 right now. Do we just wait and try to get an 11 point bump by decreasing our utilizations or do we keep shopping around? They can get us into an FHA but why would we want to put 3.5% down and pay PMI? We were bummed that we couldn't get a prequal to put in an offer on a home....
