Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Home At Last





Have you ever gone through the nightmare of trying to get a loan to buy something big like a house, car or recreational vehicle? We have, in fact we are looking at refinancing in order to get a down payment to buy a new home. I don' look forward to it because the process can be daunting, the papers, people and what seems like a very large maze that you have to wade through to appease everyone involved. We are thinking about a HUD loan but we don't know much about them, in fact we don't know much about any of the process which makes it very scary to us. We are sort of in the mercy of those we are dealing with.

I like it when we can deal with only one company, a bank that has all the services. You know like checking, savings and mortgages all handled right there, I love a smaller bank because it has the family feeling, they know you by name and always seem to like seeing you. When we bought our home we had to deal with three different financial organizations and that just was horrible, I don't want to do that again. I also love it when banks offer on line banking, I like the convenience of logging in and paying all my bills all at once with out having to make out checks or mail them.

In my search for a friendly bank that has been around a while I found Aurora Bank (I thought it was from a little town near me, it wasn't).  I discovered Aurora Bank was established in 1921 so it has stay power, most of the banks in my town are no longer around and that makes me nervous. Finding one that has been in business that long has a comforting, safe feeling to  it. They also offer most of the services I am looking for like, checking, savings, credit cards and CD's. It is wonderful that they offer you the choice on how you do your banking since you can deposit by mail or direct deposit plus they offer electronic services. The best part is they carry mortgages, home loans and refinancing, I like this because I can see if we can refinance and get pre approved for a home loan, all at the same place and all at the same time. It would be great to know before we look for a new home how much our price range would be. I want that relief of knowing that when we find our dream home we won't have to worry about not being approved. So, Is this the bank for us? Possibly but I think that before we make that decision we need to do a little more research. The first thing I am going to do is check out my money.gov these site has great tips and articles about mortgages, how to buy a home with low down payments. Tons of useful information.  My money actually compiles information from several government resources. This time I want to do it right and make all the right choices.