Pre-approved!

We have officially been pre-approved for a mortgage! Now we can meet with our realtor and start looking at homes for real :) Many thanks to my sister who recommended both our mortgage broker and realtor - so far so good!

Unfortunately, the pre-approval process that should have taken a few days was drawn out to almost two painstaking months! Long story short... James disputed a charge on his credit card over a year ago. Capitol One (who I am not a fan of currently!) left it kind of "pending" on his credit report for the whole past year. So our loan officer couldn't access his credit score.

It took many, many weeks of phone calls, explaining and re-explaining that they needed to fix it... but here we are! We're so ready to get started.

If any newbie home buyers like me are interested in what it took to be pre-approved, here's a list of documents we needed to provide. I know a few months ago I was super curious about what we'd need to do, so here you go...

• W-2s from the past two years
• Federal tax returns from the past two years
• Pay stubs from the past two months
• Bank statements from the past two months
• Copies of our driver licenses and social security cards
• Our marriage license
• James' college transcript and diploma (Only because he's been out and working full time for under a year)
• James' DD2-14 (Military discharge paperwork - only because we're getting a VA loan)

I think our loan officer is much more thorough than others who may not require all of these things before even finding a house, but I see that as a good thing. Considering the trouble it has been already, I'd hate to fall in love with a house and then loose it due to missing paperwork!

We'll hopefully check out some houses soon, and I'll be sure to share the experience here :)