House Hunt Part 2 - What I have Done, What I want to Do

Thanks for the comment Kooz. It perfectly transitions me into my next post: What I have done so far, and what I want to do in the near future...

Things I have done so far...

First, after a gracious offer form a relative, we got a copy of our FULL credit report and scores. Last year when we were shopping for a new car we did the AnnualCreditReport.com thing and received our report and scores. This "soft" pull was not very detailed but helped us ensure that there weren't any glaring problems on our report and an idea of where we stood. The good old Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 allows all Americans the ability to request this information once every 12 months for free. This is extremely helpful when researching any large purchase or credit application.

The report we received recently was a full "hard" pull. From what I can gather, "soft" pulls will not effect your credit score in any way and only pull the basic information. The "hard" pulls can effect your score if there are too many in a certain period of time (depends on each credit bureau's formulas). It is truly amazing how much information they have about you. Every piece of credit you have ever had, what your monthly payment are and have been, how many inquires have been made on your credit in the last few months, your exact balances, any late payments you have made or other interesting notes...... it goes on and on.

Luckily for us, and because of our anal paying of bills on time and not over extending ourselves, our credit report was squeaky clean. The only negative remarks on it (its nice, each bureau gives there scores as well as some reasons why they have been lowered from perfect) related to the length of our established credit history, the number of accounts it showed us as having with balances and the number of inquires we had recently.

None of these were really bad, but they were the only things cited as having lowered our scores. The credit history thing, we can't do anything about except let time pass. We don't really have that many balances, but Em's student loans are broken out into various accounts and our names are on some old accounts with our family (which is good b/c it greatly increased our credit history since they dated back a number of years). Finally, since we had moved and every utility and service runs a quick credit check to make sure you will pay your bills .... ours was slightly lower b/c of that (electric, apt. complex, home phone service ....)

As I said, overall they were great (the average credit score being around 770). Its good to know that everything is correct, up to date and looking good for when we apply for a loan.

The other thing I have done is to finally start tracking and looking at our spending and finances. Quicken to the rescue! After ~2 years of threatening to do it, I finally sunk my teeth into it just before the beginning of August and I have to say, I am loving it. Each weekend I spend about 20 minutes entering in transaction from the past week, making sure all of our accounts are up to date, etc. It gives me a good feeling having a much better idea of where our money is, where it is coming from, how fast its leaving and what kind of return we are getting on our investments. I will probably post more on this subject and related ones when I start my personal finance posts, but for now ... Quicken is a good thing. Its going to give us much better concrete numbers as to how much our expenses are and what percentage of that is needs/wants.

Next steps...

• Start putting together all of the information I have read and can find out about the various mortgage options out there, what the trade-offs of each are (pay more now or later, more tax deductions or not, less money down or higher payments....). I would like to have a good idea of this before I start talking to lenders so that for each one I can circle the ones they offer, and after plugging in there rates, be able to see the short term and long term impact of each.
• Research what programs are available in our area to help first time home buyers
• Keep looking around at homes in various areas to get a good sense of what $$ will buy you what in what part of town, what our theoretical price range can get us, and what kinds of features can alter the price of a home.
• Look into what lenders are our best bets when it comes to mortgages and try to better understand the buyer/seller/Realtor(s) relationships and services

My thought is to post an article about each of these as I get through them or at least find out some real information. I have many more things on my ToDo list, but those are the ones I want to work on in the immediate future. If anyone has any suggestions, would like more information, or thinks my thoughts are crap .... please let me know. ;)