Preparing To Buy A House: The Score

Preparing to buy a homeBuying your first home can be an exciting and stressful experience all in one.

When we bought our first house, I really didn’t know what to expect. Maybe I should have done a little bit of research ahead of time, but what’s done is done.

Your credit score is very important when getting a home loan. More or less, you credit score determines what your interest rate is going to be. The higher the score, the less interest you’re going to pay.

Just because you’re not drowning in debt, doesn’t mean that you have a great credit score.

If you’re planning to buy a house soon, one of the best things you can to do is to check your credit score beforehand. This gives you the advantage of knowing what interest rate you should be able to qualify for, as well as an opportunity to improve it before jumping into a home loan.

Do you know your credit score? Could it be improved?

I like to keep fairly close tabs on my credit score, more so before we purchased our first house. But I still check in on it every once in a while to see what’s going on.

I was a little nervous about what my FICO score would be when we first applied for our home loan. I had been using Credit Sesame, so that I could monitor my credit score for free. I just wasn’t sure if my score with them would be close enough to my actual FICO score, which is what lenders use when you get a home loan.

Thankfully, my FICO score was almost identical to the credit score I had been keeping tabs on—it was only like 2 points off. Whew!

Of course you can always go and pay 15 or 20 bucks to get your official FICO score. But why bother when you can get it close enough for free with Credit Sesame, without even giving out your credit card information.

Once your credit score is where you need it to be, you can do some research and find out what Fixed Home Loan Rates are available for you at places such as Newcastle Permanent. It’s always best to shop around and get the best rate you can. Buying a house is a very large purchase and even with excellent credit, the interest really adds up.

Did you check your credit score before buying your first house?

About Jen Perkins

Likes: saving money, being debt free (aside from our house), zombies, travel, getting money, blogging and dogs. Dislikes: debt, being broke, bunnies, wasting money, not having enough money to travel the world and paying interest. Facebook  ♥  Twitter  ♥  Google+  ♥  RSS

Comments

Preparing To Buy A House: The Score — 9 Comments

  1. Banks and Lenders do look at a credit score when one is going for a mortgage. It’s true what you say about not having debt and a high score. When we checked the wife’s score and she had no debt it was not as great as she thought. She’s never missed any payments, paid interest on cc’s nothing.. but it was all the credit she had out on credit cards that brought it down.
    Canadian Budget Binder recently posted..Shopping Tips We Use To Save MoneyMy Profile

  2. We looked at our credit score before we bought our house. We also had a good agent who was very thorough about making sure that we had everything in line and went in with the opportunity to make a well informed decision. I have not checked it in a while, but we pay everything off each month and check our credit reports each year so I am not too worried.
    John S @ Frugal Rules recently posted..Giveaway: An Online Shopping Tool for Frugal ShoppersMy Profile

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