A buyer calls me in late September. They’re looking at a house in the low $900s, putting real money down, and the loan lands right around $840,000. They already talked to a lender who told them it’s a jumbo loan — more documentation, more reserves, a different approval path, and a noticeably less pleasant conversation […]
Should a Texas Investor Accept a Prepayment Penalty on a DSCR Loan?
The term sheet comes back. Everything looks the way you expected until you hit two words near the bottom: prepayment penalty. And something in you goes cold. You’ve spent years absorbing the idea that a prepayment penalty is what a predatory lender slips into a loan to trap you. Every article you’ve ever read about […]
Financing a Short-Term Rental in the Texas Hill Country
Somewhere around the second glass at a Fredericksburg tasting room, the thought arrives fully formed: we should buy one of these. It’s not a bad instinct. The Hill Country does real short-term rental business, and people finance these properties successfully all the time. But the financing question gets decided long before you call me — […]
Asset Utilization vs. Asset Depletion: They’re Not the Same Loan
A retired engineer sat across from me with about as clean a file as I ever see. Paid-off house, seven figures in a brokerage account, no debt worth mentioning, credit in the high 700s. A bank had already told him no. Not because of anything in that paragraph. Because the box on the application labeled […]
Does My Car Payment Count Against My Mortgage Approval?
This question comes up on almost every first call, usually phrased as an apology. “I’ve still got a car payment, so I’m probably not there yet.” Maybe. But a lot of people talk themselves out of a house over a car loan that either wasn’t going to count, or wasn’t the actual problem. It’s worth […]
Your FICO Score and Your VantageScore Are Different Numbers. Since September, Your Lender Can Choose Which One to Use
I had a borrower this month whose credit score was 577. His credit score was also 640. Same person. Same credit report. Same afternoon. Two different numbers, 63 points apart, and which one we used decided what kind of loan he could get. That is not a glitch and it is not a typo. It […]
