The method
Some of the strongest programs in this state are decided by where the property sits, not by what you earn. Two buyers on the same salary, three streets apart, can get completely different answers.
Where you are buying decides which programs are even in play, and county income limits differ across the same metro. Tarrant County is not Dallas County. Starting here rules things IN that a paycheck-first conversation rules out on sight.
Not the three programs that come up in a normal conversation. There are more than 60 in Texas, and a good number of them are written for exactly the situations the short list excludes.
What it would actually mean monthly, including the trade-off. Assistance usually means a higher rate on the first mortgage, and whether that is worth it depends on how long you plan to stay.
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 favour. 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 programme, 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 programme, 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.
