Purchasing a home

One big pit fall is a lousy credit score. My husband and I worked hard to pay off debt before purchasing a home. A low credit score, can do two things, it can prevent you from buying, and if you do manage to secure a mortgage it raises your interest rate. After working to pay off debt for about a year, we then took our tax refund and paid off a bunch more. This raised our credit scores quite a bit, and we then got an even better interest rate on our mortgage. One thing I wish we would have done, is had a down payment. We got 100% financing, and we have to pay Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI) which is bundled in our mortgage payment, this raised our payment about $100.00 a month, and it doesn't benefit us at all. But we did purchase our own term life insurance policy which will pay off the house if something happens to either one of us. We felt that this was necessary, especially if something happened to him as the major breadwinner in the family. There is no way I could pay the mortgage on this house by myside. The realtor adviced us on how much to offer for the house, he really worked hard for us. We not only got the house for about $2,000 under the asking price, but the sellers also paid most of the closing costs. That was money we didn't have to take out of our pocket.

I recently purchased my home and some of the major things that you need to watch and pay close attention to is the sewer and well system if you live in the country and also propane company that is supply that area you may want to change before you move in if your not sure of the past history of the current owners, this has cause us some problems past owners didn't pay there bills so when it comes to delivering to us they are also iffy.. also make sure there is the proper insulation in it. I went to an agent myself and let them do the biding but we got it for 20,000 under asking price.