The method
The usual first question is what you earn, and it decides everything before you have said what you are trying to do. Brad runs it the other way round: the home first, then the payment you would be happy with, then what would have to be true to get there.
Before any numbers: what you are actually trying to do, and whether now is the right time to do it. It sounds soft and it is the part that decides everything after it, because a plan without a reason falls over the first time something goes wrong.
The house you and your partner talk about when nobody is listening. One story or two, which side of town, what makes it worth it. Brad wants the picture on purpose, because the whole conversation then runs backwards from there to what would have to be true to make it happen.
Not what you qualify for. What you would be content paying every month. He is deliberate about the word: doable, not comfortable. A Zillow listing saying $340,000 tells you nothing about your life. A monthly number is how households actually think.
Then he goes and builds the options. Real properties, with sharp payment estimates on different routes to the same house: borrowing against a retirement account for the down payment, using a zero-percent assistance program, or fixing the credit first to open a better one. His name for it is the sampler platter.
The part people sit up for
Not secrets, and nothing hidden. Published rules, sitting in rule books nobody reads, that happen to work in a buyer’s favor. Brad’s line about it is that somewhere around page 239 there is usually an exception that fits a situation the headline rule appears to exclude.
Most of the programs define a first-time buyer as somebody who has not owned a home in the last three years. Not somebody who has never owned one. If you owned a house four years ago and have rented since, a great many programs consider you a first-time buyer all over again, no questions asked.
This one rule puts more people back in the running than any other on the list.
If the home you owned inside that three-year window was owned as part of a marriage you are no longer part of, a number of programs treat you as a first-time buyer again. Brad's version of it: sell the house on Friday, get divorced on Monday, first-time buyer again on Tuesday.
Written into the rules. It is simply not something anybody volunteers.
USDA runs a rural home loan program, and it decides what counts as rural using census maps that are several years old. Which means towns on the outer ring of a metro can still be sitting inside the rural boundary the map remembers, rather than the one that exists now.
Where it applies: zero down, and notably inexpensive mortgage insurance.
Brad calls it the secret ninja do-it-yourself down payment assistance program, and it is your own retirement account. Most benefits administrators will let you borrow against roughly half of what is in there, as a loan from yourself rather than a withdrawal. You become the bank.
Different rules, different consequences, and worth understanding properly before using.
None of these is a guarantee and none of them applies to everybody. They are examples of why the short list is the wrong thing to make a decision against. Whether any of them is relevant depends on the county, the loan type and the situation, which is precisely the thing that takes fifteen minutes to work out and that almost nobody has ever had done for them.
“They were genuinely interested in helping people out, not just a bunch of salesmen on a screen trying to make a pitch.”
Forty-five minutes, live, and you can ask which ones apply to you.
