Hello all. We are planning to move forward with a home purchase in the next 6 months or so, as our landlords are selling the house we are living in. We'd like to get a pre approval soon so we can start looking for a home.
My FICO 8s are: My Morgage FICOs: (All of these scores were updated with my 3B yesterday)
EQ~ 652 EQ~ 614
TU~ 689 TU~ 622
EX~ 676 EX~657
From what I understand they take the middle mortgage score? So that would be the TU 622? And most VA lenders require a 620 or higher.
I don't know what my husband's mortgage score is. I know his credit is better than mine and his FICO 9 he got from NFCU is a 730.
My gross income is $45,214. I work for the county government and have been here for 9 months. Before that I was with a different county for a year and a half. He is a reservist and makes roughly $5700 off of his weekends in a year, he's been a reservist for almost 4 years after 6 years of active duty. He also does work study for the VA with $550 coming in every two weeks. His boss told him it is possible that some lenders will count the VA work as income, and that Navy Fed may be our best bet. He has a really excellent relationship with Navy Fed, and they recently approved me for a credit card with a decently high CL. I have also heard that they will go the distance to work with their customers and weigh things differently. Does anyone know if this is true?
Currently, we have three credit cards that we pay on. His Navy Fed platinum has a minimum payment of around $150. I am not sure what my mimimum will be on my Navy Fed Platinum, as it is so new. And a Capital One Quicksilver with a minimum of $35. We also have a car loan of $268, and my student loans in a repayment plan at $173. I just started grad school, so those loans should go into deferrment until Spring of 2019. I have other credit cards that all have zero balances and that I have stopped using. The minimums should I use them on those are: $35, $25, $35
My EQ has one medical collection on it that I have disputed. It's for $200 and I never received a bill, letter, or phone call about it. I only know it's there because of myFico. If our banker tells us to pay it off in order to secure a VA home loan, we will. My credit has some late payments, all 6 months or older. My husband has a couple of late payments from roughly 2 years ago.
We do not currently have anything for a down payment. We live in Island County WA. We're thinking we can afford a home of $250,000 or less. We've been paying $1400 in rent for the last two and half years, and are comfortable with that amount, but would love to make it less if we could.
I think I've covered everything I needed to. If you all mortgage wizards need more info, just let me know. 
We are typically only carrying balances on two. The Capital One I pay off every month, but sometimes miss that statement cut because of where my paychecks fall. 
I use it for all the bills and get the cashback.
Unfortunately, we don't have the funds to fully pay off either one of the Navy Fed Platinums at this time. His is sitting at just over $4000 (15%) and mine at just over $2000 (13%). We pay more than their minimums (mine has an $83 min, statement just cut) every month, but we just don't have an extra $6000 floating around.
Thanks for the information, if we can't get in with NFCU, we'll look into different lenders and possibly contact the one you used (thanks for the info!). To be clear, we could afford more than the $1400 if we had to, but would rather not. We're generally wanting to look at houses around $200,000, but understand that we could probably afford anything $250,000 or less. We used Navy Fed's required income calculators to figure this out, where they break it down by percentage. Very helpful little tool.
@Anonymous wrote:I just got preapproved for my VA mortgage loan (in underwriting now).
The mortgage company I used (NVR) also takes the middle score which for me was only 575. They said I needed 580 to qualify and that would be 5% fixed rate and it would adjust accordingly:
580 = 5%
600 = 4.75%
620 = 4.5%
640 = 4.25%
660 = 4%
I went from 575 to 611 in one month buy paying down debt. I am paying it down even further before my final HP in January.
Have you looked up the AZEO method? I would try that if at all financially possible.
I don’t know that you can get to the $1400/mo with a high interest rate, but yes I think you would qualify for sure.
Even 4% would put 250k around 1500/mo including property taxes at 1%, $80/mo insurance and No HOA.
Remember the general rule... every $10k in sale price is roughly $50/mo in mortgage, taxes and insurance, so...
250k would be 1500 ish
240k would be 1450 ish
230k would be the 1400 ish you are looking for