just a forewarning, this is really long.
Hi,
For the past 4-5 months I’ve been reading these boards and – while it’s a great source of information – found it hard to discern a start to finish story of a mortgage process through one of the big banks (BofA, Wells Fargo, etc.); so I thought that I’d post my story. It’s long, so if you don’t like to read, sorry.
In late July my wife and I decided to start looking for homes, actually just getting our ducks in a row to purchase early 2012. After looking at some homes in the area, and speaking to a local loan broker who we REALLY liked, and working with him to check credit, etc, pre-qualify us..we decided to just continue building/repairing our credit (my wife hadn’t ever had credit cards, and I’d let college years screw my score up a bit) and then we’d be ready to purchase on schedule. At the beginning of the process, my FICO score was the lower one – sitting at 621. The broker we spoke to told us that if we could get our score up to 640 he’d be able to easily get us through the process (we were planning on doing an FHA loan), and he suggested the normal routes for improving (paying down high balances, etc.)
Then the change of plans…we made the mistake of visiting a model home at a community in a PRIME location for us, and speaking to them about pricing, etc…and after finding out that there were only 8-10 lots remaining, we decided to do what we could to speed up the process. We had done some work on the credit portion, and my score was on track to be going up, but the other kink that was thrown into the mix was that for the builder to pay closing costs, you have to go through their preferred lender..in this case, Wells Fargo, which wasn’t what we wanted to do because we really liked the guy we were working with. Regardless, we decided to go speak to the Wells Fargo person, and I asked her before we even got to the credit check portion what their minimum scores were – at the time (late July) she told me that they could get a loan through with any score down to 600 as long as you had 12 months of clean history. Obviously I was skeptical as I’d heard plenty of horror stories regarding the big banks that rope people in with the ‘600 NO PROBLEM!’ lines then when underwriting gets the file they reject it, but I was promised that wouldn’t be the case…so we went ahead and spoke to her, got preapproved (score still 621 at the time), got a preapproval letter (DTI and income weren’t an issue for us, the only issue throughout the process was my score being lower than I would like it to be, although my record is spotless for the last 5 years), and made an offer on a patch of dirt we’d like to call home.
Skip a few weeks and the offer was accepted and we were making our option selections for the house under the premise that everything with the loan was fine, and there were no issues. We prepaid $2500 of our closing costs to lock in an interest rate because we weren’t sure what the credit downgrade was going to mean to rates, and locked in to 4.75% at that point. I received a commitment to lend letter from Wells Fargo about 3 weeks after the offer was accepted and such, but it had a TON of conditions attached to it, so I assumed really it was more of a preliminary thing and there was much more underwriting to be done. We signed our contract with the builder August 1st, and we weren’t scheduled to close until December 15th – as our apartment lease didn’t have an easy out for us and we didn’t want to be double paying, so we had plenty of time to work on things, time for them to build the house, etc.
So throughout September/October/November I pretty much heard nothing from Wells Fargo, I’d email and ask and get a reply back that things were submitted to the loan processor, so I’d email the loan processor and not hear anything back, a bit annoying but I was assured by the loan officer (who was extremely nice and responded well) that everything was fine, and that my worrying was much ado about nothing.
Fast forward to the last 2 weeks – the house is essentially complete, we’ve had our inspections/walkthroughs, everything is pretty much wrapping up..I get a call from the loan officer @ Wells Fargo that they have all documentation and everything has been sent to the underwriter for final approvals. Appraisal came back fine, etc. I get a call from the LO on the 9th (supposed to close on the 15th) and she says “hey, I need to talk to you about something…let me close my door.” At this point my heart sinks and I’m freaking out…but it turned out that even though we locked our interest rate in, I had emailed her asking if there was any way for us to take advantage of the current (better) rates – and lo and behold, she was able to get us 4.25%, and wanted to let me know that everything had been sent to the underwriter for a clear to close on the 15th – and she said we should hear back on Monday.
After struggling through the weekend, Monday rolled around and I got an email from our realtor and builder, which was a forward from the loan officer – WITH OUR CLEAR TO CLOSE!
So as I’m typing this – it’s December 13th, and I’m ecstatic and can’t wait to go sign my life away in less than 48 hours. I’m holding onto this document and not posting it here on the forums until I have keys in my hand, because I’m a superstitious person and don’t count my eggs before they hatch, but as it stands right now, everything looks like by the time anyone is reading this, I’ll officially be a homeowner..
In short, I was able to do my FHA mortgage through WF with a credit score less than 640 (annoyingly, my FICO score now is up to 662 and climbing, but WF hasn’t pulled my credit since 7/29 so everything that they have is based off of a 621 score) and actually had a very good experience. This is a stark contrast to what I read about a lot – so I thought it was worth writing up my story from start to finish to share. Hopefully it helps or entertains.
