If you were denied a mortgage, you shouldn’t give up hope. There are a few things you can do now to make your application stronger for when you’re ready to try again. The first step is to return to the source. If anyone knows why you’ve been denied a mortgage, it’s going to be your lender. According to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, lenders are required to tell you why you’ve been turned down, if credit played a role. They must include a letter with the specific details, as well as the name of the credit reporting agency that supplied the information they were using. This can help pinpoint the areas where you might need to change some habits in order to bump up your credit. But remember, that’s just the first step. If you believe the letter was vague or inaccurate, it’s best to contact your lender to explain your misgivings. They want your business, so they’ll be eager to have a conversation and help you dig up the root of your credit issues. If you're a first-time home buyer, it's possible that you might not have built sufficient credit history to satisfy your lender's requirements. If that's the case, it might just be a matter of time before you're ready to apply, but if you need to kickstart your credit, you can try one of these options:Talk To Your Lender
Establish Credit History
- Open a secured credit card: Secured credit cards allow you to start using credit that is secured by your own funds. After building up your score by responsibly using a secured card, you can graduate to traditional credit.
- Become authorized on a loved one’s credit card: Becoming an authorized user on a parent or other family member’s credit card can help you reap the benefits of their good credit.
- Take out a credit-builder loan: Credit-builder loans are personal loans secured by your funds and repaid in installments. Like a secured credit card, these help you slowly demonstrate your creditworthiness.
Keep An Eye On Your Credit
Not new to credit, but trying to buy a home with bad credit? The best way to get the ball rolling on rebuilding credit is by monitoring it. Check your credit report and score regularly. Try to always stay on top of your bills so you don’t risk your mortgage being denied due to a late payment. You should also track your monthly debts and credit utilization to see where you need to make changes to improve your score.
Check For Errors In Your Credit Report
Between the credit bureaus and the creditors that play a part in developing your credit report, mistakes are bound to happen every now and then. These errors can lower your credit score and be a big headache to fix.
Common errors include outdated information, incorrect payment statuses, wrongfully duplicated negatives, and most importantly, fraudulent accounts. You should eliminate any chance of error by sifting through your credit report with a fine-toothed comb. If you find anything that looks unusual, take the proper steps to dispute your credit report.
Pay Down And Diversify Debt
One of the best ways to improve your score is to pay down any debts and pay off any collections showing on your credit report. If it’s unrealistic for you to pay off the entire balance, try to work out an arrangement with creditors to pay what you can, which will show up on your credit report as “paid as agreed.” While it won’t raise your credit score as much as paying off the debt in full, paying something is better than nothing.
Another big key to increasing your score is to have a good mix of revolving credit debt and items like installment loans, such as an auto or personal loan. Mortgage lenders want to see that you can effectively manage different types of debt. Just make sure to pay them on time and don’t take on more than you can handle.
Keep Accounts Open
When you pay your debt down, try not to close the accounts. This could hurt your score because you want to have a variety of accounts open, particularly ones that have been open a long time, to show the fullest extent of your credit history. It can be beneficial to have a mix of credit cards, auto loans, student loans and potentially personal loans to show you’re adept at handling credit.
While you want to pay down debt, it can hurt your credit score to completely close an account because it will eliminate the amount of credit you have available. If you close an account, even if you spend the same amount on your other credit cards, you’re using a larger percentage of your remaining available credit. That’s what’s known as “credit utilization,” and if you use too much of your credit, future creditors may be hesitant to extend loans and other credit to you.
Increase Your Credit Limits
A good second phase of your credit score rebuild after you’ve shown your hard work is to try and get your credit limits increased. For example, if you currently have a $500 credit limit, a lender might be willing to increase it to $1,000 once they see the strides you’ve made.
Keep Credit Utilization Low
In order to keep your credit score high, you don’t want to use too much of it, as this can be a sign of financial stress.
Your credit usage is monitored in the form of credit utilization, which displays your current debt as a percentage. For example, if you have one credit card with a $1,000 limit and another with a $3,000 limit and total carryover balances of $800 per month between the accounts, your credit utilization would be 20% ($800/$4,000). Experts usually recommend using no more than 30% of your overall credit limit between all of your accounts.
Build Your Application Before Reapplying
If your application was denied, remember that there are likely multiple steps you’ll need to take in order to repair it. There are a few ways you can immediately rectify the issues an underwriter finds in your mortgage application. If the fixes were quick – if you were missing some information, for example – your mortgage underwriter would likely have granted conditional approval.
If you’re denied a mortgage, it’ll probably take some time to fix up your application, so don’t expect to reapply immediately without addressing the issues that came up the first time around.
