Mortgage
Answers to mortgage questions - buying, refinancing, home equity, PMI, escrow, and paying off your home.
3 guides in this topic.
Where to start, and why in this order
The three gates a lender applies, in the order it applies them.
| Read | Guide | The question it answers | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What Credit Score Do You Actually Need To Buy a House? | There isn’t one magic number, there’s a range of doors. | Rule and exceptions |
| 2 | What Is Debt-to-Income Ratio and Why Do Lenders Care So Much? | One ratio quietly shapes how much house a lender thinks is realistic. | Rule and exceptions |
| 3 | How Much Should You Actually Budget for Closing Costs? | The purchase price is only part of what’s due at the closing table. | Rule and exceptions |
Three gates, applied in order
A mortgage underwriter is not forming an overall impression of you. They are checking three specific things, roughly in sequence: whether your credit history clears their threshold, whether your monthly obligations leave room for the payment, and whether you can actually fund the closing. Fail any one and the other two do not rescue it.
The reading order above follows those gates, because preparing for them out of order wastes months.
Where buyers get caught
- Budgeting for the down payment only. Closing costs are a separate, substantial sum, and they are due in cash at the same time. The guide above breaks down what actually sits inside that figure.
- Borrowing to the approval limit. An approval is a statement about the maximum risk the lender will accept, not a recommendation. The payment that clears underwriting can still leave a household with no margin.
- Opening credit during the process. A new account or a large purchase between pre-approval and closing can move the ratios that already cleared.
- Assuming the app score is the underwriting score. Mortgage lenders often pull older scoring models across all three bureaus and use the middle one.
What is deliberately not here
No lender comparisons, no rate quotes, and no calculators that produce a “maximum affordable” figure. Rates change daily and affordability depends on things a page cannot see. The mortgage calculator on this site shows the payment arithmetic for figures you supply, and shows its formula, so you can check it against any quote you are given.