Back in Nov., my wife's purse was stolen so she canceled all her cards. Macy's, which she had a recent $40 purchase on was one of them. She uses it probably twice per year. Anyways, the bill is still mailed to her parent's house and she forgot about the charge in the wake of the pain of replacing all your cards and IDs and such from a stolen purse.
So fast forward to 2017 (Macy's card went "unpaid" through Feb.) My wife and I are in the process of purchasing our first home here in SoCal. In January we had our FICO pulled when we put an offer on a house. We both had >780 and were offered great rates. Unfortunately (at the time), our offer wasn't accepted. It sucked, but we had vacation coming up so we took some time off from the housing hunt.
So now we have an accepted offer (only contingency left is that the seller finds a new house in the next 7 days. FML. I hate waiting in purgatory. We love the house). We go to a trusted mortgage lender and we tell him >780 FICO so we can get the quote going. They offered a 3.75% rate.
Great!
So as we progress, the lender does a hard pull on our credit. Lady calls me at work and states they can't give us 3.75% because my wife's credit was 767, not >780 like we stated (I am at 787).
WTH? What happened?!
Found out that the Macy's bill went into unpaid status for 1 month, which dinged my wife's otherwise impeccable credit record. I've since added her Macy's account to Mint, to keep track of it just in case.
We were offered a 3.875 rate, which was still better than anyone else offered so that is what we are going with.
But then again, maybe the mortgage lender was bullshitting us. Either way, we are happy with the rate we have. Now it's just fingers crossed the sellers find something this weekend.
TL;DR Because of 1 unfortunate late payment that dinged a credit score by 20 points, over the life of a 30 year, fixed rate conventional mortgage, a 1/8th of a percentage point increase will cost us $16,000. That is, of course, we don't re-fi or sell at some point in the future.
Submitted May 06, 2017 at 11:48AM by chiguy http://ift.tt/2qMrTya
