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The Questions to Ask Mortgage Lender or Broker
When you are looking to buy a house or refinance your mortgage, your loan officer has a significant role to play.
Your loan officer should be in a position to help you make the mortgage process as easy and efficient as possible.
In this post, we will learn what questions to ask mortgage lenders and how to prepare yourself before talking to one.
How to prepare yourself before talking to a mortgage lender?
A lot of people feel skeptical to make that first phone call because they don’t know what to expect.
Your mortgage lender is going to ask you for personal information like your full name, date of birth, and your social security number.
The next thing that any mortgage lender is going to ask is for your two-year residential history.
This means they want to know where have you lived for the past two years. This might include the places that you have rented, owned, or sold any property.
All this information would be required by your loan officer so you might as well have that information with and can provide the same to your loan officer.
The next thing your mortgage lender is going to ask you is about your employment history.
Again, it is a two-year history that your lender would require.
Make sure you have all the paperwork ready with the dates and times that you have given to each of the employers in the past two years.
The lender would require the employer’s name, the address where you worked, your position in the company, and how much you earned.
To make things faster, you can make sure you have a proper breakdown of your income including base salary, bonus, commission, or overtime which will help the lender to know your income.
If you don’t have that information with you, the lender has to get a verification of employment completed which can take a bit longer.
The next thing that you need to be ready with is bank statements and 401k.
You should very minimum know who you bank with and how much you have saved in each one of these accounts.
Also now is a good time to see how much you have in 401k, IRA, or any other type of accounts that you may have.
When your lender starts talking about your assets or how much money you have saved up, you have these numbers ready and answer those questions.
What Questions to Ask Mortgage Lender?
Once you have all the information ready with you then you would be more comfortable and confident about what questions to ask the mortgage lender and which direction your conversation needs to go.
1 - Do I qualify for multiple types of programs?
More often than not, the buyers or homeowners will qualify for more than one program.
It is up to the lender or you to ask why are you being placed in that specific type of loan and is there a better option for you.
This is one of the most important questions to ask mortgage lenders as the loan program will determine your payments and mortgage insurance if applicable.
2 - Is there anything on my credit report that I can update or change to qualify for better loan terms?
The next question to ask mortgage lenders is to know if there is anything on your credit report which if rectified can help you qualify for a better loan.
There are many instances where some things are showing up on your credit that could be rectified by doing a re-score.
This will help to increase your credit score substantially making you qualified for a better interest rate. It might be just as simple as paying down a credit card balance or paying off a portion of your car loan.
Which might bring up your credit score.
Not every lender has the ability to do a credit rescore, so that is also one of the questions to ask the mortgage broker or lender that you are working with.
3 - What are my estimated closing costs or fees?
This is one of the most significant questions to ask mortgage brokers or lenders. Your property purchase or refinance will have fees associated with it.
Asking about the fees will not only help you to know the cost of the loan but also help you to compare multiple options.
You can shop around for your mortgage with multiple lenders who can offer the lowest closing costs with the best interest rates.
Conclusion
These are the three most important questions to ask mortgage lenders.
However, before you ask the questions the loan officer might need some information about your current income, credit, and asset situation to be able to answer your questions.
Make sure you are prepared with all the information to have a positive conversation in which you know what questions to ask a mortgage broker or lender.
