Upon submitting your application with Housing Nonprofit, we will ask you to give us permission to pull your credit report. This is required for all mortgage applications, and will give the lender a sense of your commitment to making timely payments towards your mortgage in the future..
All three Credit Bureaus must have a score (Equifax, Transunion, and Experian)
The report must be dated within 90 days of your application (if we have an old credit report on file for you, we will try to use it again if it is not too old. If it is over 90 days, we will need to re-pull the report)
The report must include your full legal name and your correct current address
If you are applying with a co-borrower who is your spouse, the report will be ordered as a joint credit report
We are looking for a minimum FICO score of 600 or higher to qualify as mortgage ready. For lower scores we can still help by creating a plan to improve the score. Oftentimes it is only a few payments that are needed to get a credit score moving in the right direction.
Check to make sure your credit is not frozen:
In order to protect your identity, you may have chosen to freeze your credit. This is a helpful tool provided by the credit bureaus, and we would highly recommend using this if you are worried about having your identity stolen. However, you will need to unfreeze your credit for the purposes of pulling credit for your loan application. You can choose to unfreeze for a certain amount of time, and then it will refreeze after the time period is up. In order to remove the freeze, you must contact each bureau directly. Here are there contact information below:
Equifax: 888-298-0045, 866-478-0027
https://www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/credit-freeze/
Transunion: 888-909-8872
https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze
Experian: 888-397-3742
https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
Check to make sure your name is spelled out correctly:
If you used a nickname instead of your full legal name on the application, we may need proof of your “AKA” or we will need to re-pull your credit report under your full name
If you recently changed your legal name (ex. changing your last name when getting married), we will need documentation of the name change (ex. the name change documentation or your marriage certificate). If you are a “Jr.” or “II” or “III” etc, then we may need to re-pull your report to include this. Without the suffix, your credit may get mixed up with the “Sr.” or someone with your same name.
How to check your credit yourself:
By law, you are entitled to 1 free credit report per year from each of the 3 bureaus (a total of 3 reports per year). AnnualCreditReport.com is the only website recommended by the government to get your free credit report. You can request these by visiting the website below, or calling the phone number also included below. You cannot get the free report by contacting the bureaus directly.
AnnualCreditReport.com
1-877-322-8228
What to look for:
After receiving a copy of your free credit report, you should review all open tradelines to make sure everything is correct. You should see all your open debts such as credit cards, auto loans, student loans, personal loans, mortgages, etc. You will also see any debt that you may have signed as a co-signor. If you see anything that looks wrong (ie. if one of your tradelines is in collections, or if a payment was marked as late but you paid on time), you should contact the institution that is reporting this mistake, and ask them to fix it on your report. Once they have fixed this. These sorts of errors are more common than most people think. Requesting the bureau to fix any errors in your credit report is the least expensive way to boost your credit and it can make a significant difference in your chances for approval. .