A little about myself, I am a soldier currently stationed in Iraq cleaning up my credit. I have learned so much on these forums, thank you everyone for contributing! I have very bad credit, mostly due to the number of deployments, and sometimes bills get pushed back. I have a 509 equifax score, 529 experian, and 569 transunion. I am in the process of disputes, pfd's, and gw's. I have seen a rise in my scores, and I know it will take time. My wifes credit is a little better, 569 experian, 600, transunion, and 569 equifax. We know it will go up quite a bit once we pay down all her credit card to 10% utilization. Currently she is about at 90% on all three cards.
Now, we shopped around for a mortgage in the summer time, just to kind of see where we stood. The one good thing we have is that we make pretty good money between the both of us. We clear around 6000$ a month after taxes. Our only major bills are her truck payment (600) insurance (150), student loans (300), and various credit cards (total min a month is 250). Our question is why we were told to clean up our credit report when we were trying to qualify for a loan? I have six collections, and she has three which total about 7000 dollars when all is said and done. Mostly petty things on my credit from my deployments, like gas, cable, and one charge off on a credit card. The mortgage broker says we need to pay off all of our collections, and we should qualify. He did not like that she changed jobs (same field, she is a engineer). She worked for her old company for 5 years, and took basically the same job with another company about two months back, which pays her about 10% more.
Can someone please tell me what I NEED to do to qualify for a mortgage? I want to use my VA home loan guranty, as I am on Active Duty in the ARMY. We pay an outrageous amount for rent, and would have NO problem paying 1500-1800 a month in a mortgage. Why is it so hard for us to qualify? I wish a broker would just tell me exactly what to do to qualify, so that I can do it. We want to look for a house in May when I come home for leave for three weeks. Is that a unrealistic time frame to get everything in order? We do have expendable money to pay off all our old debts. We just want to do everything quick, and go about it the right way.
Thanks alot and any advice would be appreciated, especially from shane!