Solidifying That Mortgage Quote

You’re in the market for a home and it’s an exciting time. Your realtor may be pressuring you to go to a lender and get a mortgage quote so that you know in what range you can buy safely and prequalify too. You may even be tech savvy enough to hop online and find networking areas where you can get several mortgage quotes from various lenders, but then you’re left wondering which one is the best deal. How do you really know whether one mortgage quote is better than another? That’s where the good faith estimate comes in.

The Breakdown of a Good Mortgage Quote

If you really want to know how it all breaks down, you have to get a good faith estimate from a lender for your mortgage quote. You can get a good faith estimate from any number of lenders that you want and for different mortgage products too. Some people shop for the best deal this way and take the best offer and show it to other lenders to try to beat that one as well. Without a good faith estimate a mortgage quote may not be reliable. The Federal government insists that lenders provide a good faith estimate within three days of applying for a loan.

Some of the things you can expect a good faith estimate to show are the potential costs at closing of the following:

• Loan application fee
• Fees for pulling credit reports
• Title work
• Attorney fees
• Cost of appraisal
• Cost of inspection
• Survey work
• Document handling and processing fees
• Taxes
• Escrow accounts
• Your interest rate
• The terms of the loan
• The amortization schedule

Comparing Two or Three Mortgage Quotes

If you are trying to find a good deal, you will want to get the good faith estimates for the different mortgage quotes on the exact same product to fully compare them. If you get one that has a teaser interest rate that shifts after six months to a year, it may initially look favorable but in the long run will cost you more money. Make sure that they all have the same length of term because a 40-year loan will look like a better deal than a 30-year loan when it comes to the amount of the monthly payment you have to make. However, you pay significantly more money over the life of the mortgage with a longer term than you do with a shorter-term mortgage. So, always make sure that you are looking at very similar offers from different lenders and not two separate types of loan products.