At age 21, I bought my first "home". It was a large old house that had been converted into four apartment units and the garage converted into a fifth unit which is where I lived. It was owner-financed with 10 percent down and a 5 percent interest rate land contract. At the time, my friends had fun kidding me about the "dump" and my "slumlording". (Actually, the property wasn't that bad).

Are you reading Mortgage Secrets to learn how to deal with shaky credit, low cash, affordability, and so on? Good! You'll find more creative financing ideas here than anywhere else. Yet to focus on creative financing begs the ultimate question: Why do you confront such financial issues? Are you managing your money as well as you could?

Avoid emotional impulses. Identify, clarify, and separate emotions from your financial goals and motives.

How you choose your property and arrange financing can add (or subtract) tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars to (from) your net worth.

 

Do you think you want to own a single-family house, a condo, or coop? Before you decide for sure, answer this question: Would you instead be willing to live in a fourplex for three to five years if that choice plumped up your wealth by $100,000 or more?

In the world of property finance for homebuying and investing the loan market offers thousands of lenders and hundreds of financing techniques. Plus, interest rates, closing costs, credit standards, and underwriting guidelines vary among lenders.

Read through the following list of 65 affordability techniques; these techniques only sample your loan alternatives. Because you enjoy a cornucopia of choices, no loan rep (or anyone else) can tell you exactly how much loan (or how much property) you can afford until they work through these and other possibilities. If one lender (or seller) says, "No" you say "Next".

There are probably thousands of them. Really. Your own real estate agent's site should be chock-full of consumer information. Besides Fannie's and Freddie's sites, which I already mentioned, let's review some of the websites that provide useful home loan information without also trying to sell you something.

That depends on whether your lender has the type of system that lets you do that. If a lender or mortgage broker has the ability to let you track the status of your loan application, they'll let you know at the beginning of your loan process. You'll also choose a user name and password to use when you log on. There are variations on this theme, but in practice, most systems allow you to log onto your lender's website, type in your loan number or password, and see a status report on where your loan is in the approval process and what has or has not been done.