So my fiancé and I have started saving to hopefully buy a house next year, and I guess I wanted to know if this is even a realistic possibility. I’ve been wanting to get in touch with an actual person to figure out where we are in terms of buying a house, but we haven’t been able to commit to a date yet. So far, we’ve saved about $8,000 (would be more, but his dad needed money for grandma’s funeral) and I can put away about $1,500 each month, probably even $2,000. I have no collections, no late payments, and my scores are in my signature. My AAoA is about 2.5 years, but I have quite a few inquiries (most of which should fall off at the end of this year, beginning of next). My income alone is $57,000 and I get $7,200 a year ($600/month) for child support. My DTI ratio is about 17% right now.
My fiancé has pretty decent credit as well. He does have about 1 or 2 late payments (I believe 60 days, but they are about 4 years old). He just got a new job, so I’m not too sure about his income right now. His base pay is probably around $28,000, but he gets commission and he’s been doing quite well and making almost as much as I do these past 2 months. I don’t know how lenders calculate commission or if they just use the base pay? He doesn’t have any collections, just those late payments. EX 690, TU 702, EQ 698 are his current scores.
I don’t know what other info you guys would need, but I will happily provide anything that might help me understand where we stand at the moment. We've both never purchased a home, so we're both first time home buyers. We live on the border of Los Angeles and Orange County, so even the smaller houses aren't cheap here. I've yet to find even a 2 bedroom house for less than $500,000. We only need a 2 bedroom, but would prefer 3 in case his mom needs to come live with us.
@AZEsq wrote:You're in an extremely high COLA. This means, you'll need to reach out to a broker who works with people in your income bracket. It's more work and they MUST know how to navigate first time homeowner programs and downpayment assistance programs. I highly recomend contacting the county agency that handles the low income housing and seeing if htey have realtor referrals: http://housing.lacounty.gov/ProgramInfo.html http://www.occommunityservices.org/hcd/housing/rehab
You probably need to have a phenomenal year and save exactly what you've laid out here, but it's doable. Good luck and I hope you update us with your progress.
Thanks for the help! What sucks is my stupid unit is still in negotiations about salary and other crap, so we most likely won't even get our COLA this year. On top of that, we HAVE to start paying 7.5% into our retirement each month. So I get my COLA taken away for now, and get less money in each check, so this year is going to suck. I may not be able to save as much as I thought, but I'll still try to save as much as possible. I've been trying to read up on the downpayment programs, but I don't think I'm going to learn much without actually speaking to someone.