Getting Ready to Leave VA

Adam and I graduated from Virginia Tech in '09 and ended up falling into jobs in the area.  We purchased our house here in 2011 with the help of the  USDA Rural Housing Development loan program.  I highly recommend one of these loans.  There are a few stipulations in order to qualify and they differ between the loans.  There are two loans for owner occupancy properties and both require the home to be located in a rural area.  Within the USDA site, you can check if a particular area or property qualifies.  In this area of Virginia, almost every town qualifies except the heart of Blacksburg (where Virginia Tech is located) and the city of Roanoke.

You must also fit certain income requirements.  For the guaranteed loan, your household cannot make more than 115% above the median income level for the area and for the direct loan, no more than 50% above median income level.  They also have loans to help fix up your current home.

The USDA loan is a no down payment loan.  It also does not require mortgage insurance, like the FHA loan.  If we had gone with an FHA loan over the USDA loan, we would have had to come up with a down payment (although, not a large one) and would have ended up paying over $100 a month extra on mortgage insurance.  We went to the closing of that house with less than $300.  Unfortunately for us, we cannot qualify for another USDA loan until we sell our current house.  However, since our new house is a Fanny Mae property, we qualify for their HomePath loan.  We have to put 5% down but there is also no mortgage insurance.

With all the loan options, you have to first qualify for the loan through a bank or mortgage company.  Not all banks do all loans, so you might have to look around.  For our first loan, we went through a smaller, local bank due to Adam not having enough established credit for the larger bank.  Luckily, the first bank we dealt with had contacts with the local bank and sent us over there.  Our first mortgage was transferred to Chase days after we closed on the house.

Not only do we have our mortgage through Chase, but we also have a credit card through them that is paid off every month.  So when we found out we were moving, we tried to get pre-approved through Chase's website.  A couple days later, on a Saturday, we missed a call from them.  We called back and left a message.  No one ever got back to us.  We then received rejection letters in the mail saying that we could fill out a full application and pay the non-refundable application fee instead.  They stated that our credit was not good enough to be pre-approved.  However, we both have good to excellent credit scores.  We again tried to call them and never received a call back.  I guess one mortgage that is overpaid on time and a credit card that is paid off each month, doesn't give them enough interest.

When we were visiting Alabama, I made two appointments with banks and both pre-approved us easily.  I would suggest not trying to get pre-approved online and actually have a meeting, especially if you are interested in a low or no down payment loan.

We are working with BB&T on this next loan.  There are fewer banks that handle the HomePath loan than the other types of loans (even our Realtor wasn't familiar with the loan).

I figured I would end this wordy post with some pictures of our Virginia house (that is currently for sale):

 The Front Door

  Christmas Lights

Living Room and Kitchen

Living Room

Kitchen

Bathroom

Wall Pockets in Bathroom

First Bedroom

Customized Desk

2nd Bedroom

Master Bedroom

Master Details

Master Bedroom (truer to real life wall color)

Half of the Full Basement

Bar in Basement

Carport and Shed

Back Deck

Deck and Scout

View from Deck

There you go. Just a few pictures of our Virginia house and a little bit of info on different mortgages.  If you would like more details on our process of purchasing our homes, let me know.  If you would like to buy our Virginia house, please offer more than the asking price :)