Home Loan Questions to Ask a Lender

March 6, 2020

First-time home buyers come to the home loan game without experiencing any of the journey to home ownership first-hand. Even if you watched your parents negotiate a home loan, doing it yourself is another thing.

But what most people don’t realize (at first) is that haggling or negotiating your home loan can save you some money and get you a better deal AND doesn’t have to be as uncomfortable as you might think.

Why?

There is a secret to negotiating a loan that some people use to their advantage and you can, too. It involves comparing three lenders or more (anonymously) and asking some questions. That doesn’t sound too intimidating, does it?

Let’s say you want to use an FHA mortgage to buy a condo or a house in the suburbs. You might not have an idea yet of how much home you can afford, or you might need to guess a bit. But what you need to do is to get the going interest rates offered by the lenders, the cost of the lender’s fees and other expenses, and overall how much the loan will cost you over the full term of the mortgage.

Once you have this information from three lenders, see who offers the best deal. But is it REALLY as simple as that?

At this stage, someone is wondering what to do if you like the TERMS the lender is offering but you wish a different lender were offering them. This is where the negotiations start, and very easy ones at that.
 
When you call a lender you DO want to work with, ask them to give you the same information you got from the others. But when they tell you their offer, does it go as low as the other ones you’ve gotten? If not, TELL THEM! “I got these terms from lender XYZ. Can you beat their offer?”
That is a simple question, really, and not a reality-show style back-and-forth showdown between you and the lender.

If they can’t match the best offer you’ve gotten, you can choose to accept their terms anyway, walk away, or think about it and decide later. But what you have done in this case is drive a good bargain for yourself by asking one simple question. The rest is up to the lender.

This is a tactic you can use for any major loan such as an auto loan, home loan, refinance loan, etc. You don’t have to brace yourself for an endless negotiation, just ask the one revealing question and see what happens.

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